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Deploying an R Shiny app

It is not currently possible to deploy new apps on the Analytical Platform, though we are working to make this functionality available again as soon as possible.

In the meantime, you can still access and manage existing apps.

If you have an existing app that requires urgent redeployment, please submit a request via GitHub. We normally redeploy apps each Wednesday, where we have recevied a request by the Friday before.

Manage existing apps

Manage app users

If authentication is enabled, access to your app will be controlled by email address.

To manage the users of your app:

  1. Go to the Analytical Platform control panel.
  2. Select the Webapps tab.
  3. Select the name of the app you want to manage or select Manage app.

To add app users:

  1. Enter the email addresses of the users in the box titled ‘Add app customers by entering their email addresses’ – multiple email addresses can be separated by spaces, tabs, commas and semicolons, and can contain capital letters.
  2. Select Add customer.

To remove an app user, select Remove customer next to the email address of the customer you want to remove.

You can ask the Analytical Platform team to add or remove users to the access list on the #analytical-platform-support Slack channel or by email toanalytical_platform@digital.justice.gov.uk.

Access the app

Your deployed app can be accessed at repository-name.apps.alpha.mojanalytics.xyz, where repository-name is the name of the relevant GitHub repository.

If the repository name contains underscores, these will be converted to dashes in the app URL. For example, an app with a repository called repository_name would have the URL repository-name.apps.alpha.mojanalytics.xyz.

When accessing an app, you can choose whether to sign in using an email link (default) or a one-time passcode. To sign in with a one-time passcode, add /login?method=code to the end of the app’s URL, for example, https://kpi-s3-proxy.apps.alpha.mojanalytics.xyz/login?method=code. This requires the app to have been deployed since the auth-proxy release on 30/01/19.

Troubleshooting app sign-in

“That email address is not authorized for this app (or possibly another error occurred)” error, after entering email address
  1. Check that the user is authorised to access the app:
    1. Log in to the control panel.
    2. Navigate to the app detail page.
    3. Check if the user’s email address is listed under ‘App customers’.
    4. If it is not, refer them to the app owner to obtain access.
  2. Check that the user is using the correct email address – there is sometimes confusion between @justice and @digital.justice email addresses.
  1. Check that the user is not trying to use the same link to access the app multiple times – links expire after the first user and a new one must be requested.
  2. Check that the user is trying to access the app using Chrome or Firefox – if links automatically open in Internet Explorer, they may need to copy and paste the link without clicking it into Chrome or Firefox.

Sometimes the link doesn’t work because it gets accessed by a system such as anti-virus software, spam filters or the email client’s ‘link previewer’ (e.g. to display the web page when you hover over the link). In this case, you should sign in using a one-time passcode, as described above in access the app section.

“IP x.x.x.x is not whitelisted”

Check that the user is trying to access the app from one of the trusted networks specified in deploy.json.

Other troubleshooting tips
  • Check that they are trying to access the app using a URL beginning with https:// not http://.
  • Look for similar issues log in the analytics-platform repository.
  • Try asking the user to clear their cookies by visiting https://alpha-analytics-moj.eu.auth0.com/logout and try again.

In addition the AP team can:

Advanced

Editing the Dockerfile

A Dockerfile is a text document that contains all the commands a user could call on the command line to assemble an image.

In most cases, you will not need to change the Dockerfile when deploying your app.

If your app uses packages that have additional system dependencies, you will need to add these in the Dockerfile. If you are unsure how to do this, contact the Analytical Platform team.

A Dockerfile reference can be found in the Docker documentation.

Getting the current user of the app

An RShiny app can find out who is using it. This can be useful to log an audit trail of significant events. Specifically, it can determine the email address that the user logged into the app with. This is sensitive data, so you must ensure that you are following all relevant information governance processes.

The shiny-headers-demo repository contains an example of how to do this.

These features require you to be using the Analytical Platform version of shiny-server.

Email address

You can obtain the logged in user’s email address by using the following code in the server function of your app:

get("HTTP_USER_EMAIL", envir=session$request)

This line in shiny-headers-demo shows the code in context.

Full user profile

You can access the full user profile by making a request directly from the RShiny app to the auth-proxy’s /userinfo endpoint using the following code inside your server function.

# library(httr)
# library(jsonlite)


profile <- fromJSON(content(GET("http://localhost:3001/userinfo", add_headers(cookie=get("HTTP_COOKIE", envir=session$request))), "text"))

This line shows the code in context.

Example response
{
  "email": "name@example.gov.uk",
  "email_verified": true,
  "user_id": "email|12345121312",
  "picture": "https://s.gravatar.com/avatar/94deebe3b87fc5e9b3b4469112573cc0?s=480&r=pg&d=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.auth0.com%2Favatars%2Fna.png",
  "nickname": "name",
  "identities": [
    {
      "user_id": "12345121312",
      "provider": "email",
      "connection": "email",
      "isSocial": false
    }
  ],
  "updated_at": "2019-07-15T09:54:34.353Z",
  "created_at": "2018-07-12T14:26:45.663Z",
  "name": "name@example.gov.uk",
  "last_ip": "1.1.1.1",
  "last_login": "2019-07-15T09:54:34.353Z",
  "logins_count": 20,
  "blocked_for": [],
  "guardian_authenticators": []
}

Troubleshooting

Kibana

All logs from deployed apps can be viewed in Kibana.

To view all app logs:

  1. Select Discover from the left sidebar.
  2. Select Open from the menu bar.
  3. Select Application logs (alpha) from the saved searches.

To view the logs for a specific app:

  1. Select Add a filter.
  2. Select app_name as the field.
  3. Select is as the operator.
  4. Insert the app name followed by ‘-webapp’ as the value.
  5. Select Save.

Log messages are displayed in the message column.

By default, Kibana only shows logs for the last 15 minutes. If no logs are available for that time range, you will receive the warning ‘No results match your search criteria’.

To change the time range, select the clock icon in the menu bar. There are several presets or you can define a custom time range.

Kibana also has experimental autocomplete and simple syntax tools that you can use to build custom searches. To enable these features, select Options_ from within the search bar, then toggle Turn on query features.

Deploying locally

If you have a MacBook, you can use Docker locally to test and troubleshoot your RShiny app. You can download Docker Desktop for Mac from the Docker website.

To build and run your R Shiny app locally, follow the steps below:

  1. Clone your app’s repository to a new folder on your MacBook – this guarantees that the app will be built using the same code as on the Analytical Platform. You may need to create a new connection to GitHub with SSH.
  2. Open a terminal session and navigate to the directory containing the Dockerfile using the cd command.
  3. Build the Docker image by running: {bash} docker build . -t IMAGE:TAG where IMAGE is a name for the image, for example, my-docker-image, and TAG is the version number, for example, 0.1.
  4. Run a Docker container created from the Docker image by running: {bash} docker run -p 80:9999 IMAGE:TAG
  5. Go to 127.0.0.1:80 to view the app.

If the app does not work, follow the steps below to troubleshoot it:

  1. Start a bash session in a Docker container created from the Docker image by running: {bash} docker run -it -p 80:80 IMAGE:TAG bash
  2. Install the nano text editor by running: {bash} apt-get update apt-get install nano
  3. Open shiny-server.conf in the nano text editor by running: {bash} nano /etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf
  4. Add the following lines at the beginning of shiny-server.conf: {bash} access_log /var/log/shiny-server/access.log tiny; preserve_logs true;
  5. Write the changes by pressing Ctrl+O.
  6. Exit the nano text editor by pressing Ctrl+X.
  7. Increase the verbosity of logging and start the Shiny server by running: {bash} export SHINY_LOG_LEVEL=TRACE /bin/shiny-server.sh
  8. Open a new terminal session.
  9. Start a new bash session in the Docker container by running: {bash} docker exec -it CONTAINER_ID bash You can find the CONTAINER_ID by running docker ps.
  10. View the logs by running: {bash} cat /var/log/shiny-server/access.log

For further details, see the Shiny server documentation.

This page was last reviewed on 30 January 2023. It needs to be reviewed again on 30 January 2024 by the page owner #analytical-platform-support .
This page was set to be reviewed before 30 January 2024 by the page owner #analytical-platform-support. This might mean the content is out of date.