Portable Browser Issues when deploying R Shiny App

Question

I've built a complex Shiny interface that pulls from an internally networked ODBC table and allows a user to interact with the data through their browser. The company is on Windows 7 Enterprise and IT only supports IE 9. Some users have chrome installed in their user folders, some have firefox, some use IE 9. I followed a tutorial from R-Bloggers (here: http://www.r-bloggers.com/deploying-desktop-apps-with-r/) and it runs on my machine using a portable Chrome browser downloaded from PortableApps.com. Great. Unfortunately the interface has not started on ANYONE else's machine that has their own local Chrome browser installed. Following the tutorial, I use the following vb script: ``` Rexe = "R-Portable\App\R-Portable\bin\Rscript.exe" Ropts = "--no-save --no-environ --no-init-file --no-restore --no-Rconsole" RScriptFile = "runShinyApp.R" Outfile = "ShinyApp.log" strCommand = Rexe & " " & Ropts & " " & RScriptFile & " 1> " & Outfile & " 2>&1" intWindowStyle = 0 ' Hide the window and acti…

Accepted Answer

I started with those same articles, but developed the RInno package to solve this exact problem, i.e. when you want to share your desktop Shiny app with non-technical users who can't be expected to mess around with all those details.

To get started:

```
install.packages("RInno")
require(RInno)
RInno::install_inno()
```

Then you just need to call two functions to create an installation framework:

```
create_app(app_name = "myapp", app_dir = "path/to/myapp")
compile_iss()
```

This will create an installation wizard that runs like any other program, but installs your shiny app on a Windows desktop computer. If you would like to include R for your co-workers who don't have it installed, add `include_R = TRUE` to `create_app`:

```
create_app(app_name = "myapp", app_dir = "path/to/myapp", include_R = TRUE)
```

It defaults to include shiny, magrittr and jsonlite, so if you are using other packages like ggplot2 or plotly, just add them to the `pkgs` argument. You can also include GitHub packages to the `remotes` argument:

```
create_app(
    app_name = "myapp", 
    app_dir  = "path/to/myapp"
    pkgs     = c("shiny", "jsonlite", "magrittr", "plotly", "ggplot2"),
    remotes  = c("talgalili/installr", "daattali/shinyjs"))
```

If you are interested in other features, check out FI Labs - RInno

Portable Browser Issues when deploying R Shiny App

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