This package allows users to create a shortcut for their shiny app that, when run, will launch the app directly in the user’s default browser. No need to navigate to the correct working directory in R (or even to open R at all!). Simply run the shortcut and the app will fire up. Works for both windows and linux based systems.
Inspired by this blog post by Mark Sellors at Mango Solutions.
# Package not yet on CRAN, needs installed from Github:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ewan-keith/shinyShortcut")The package loads just a single function, also named
shinyShortcut(). It takes three arguments:
shinyDirectory: The home directory of your shiny app
(that contains your server.r, ui.r, or
app.r files).OS: The operating system for the app to be ran on, must
be "windows" or "unix".gitIgnore: Whether to update the
.gitignore file to prevent the shortcut files being tracked
by git.The function writes an exectuable script (.vbs on windows and
.desktop on unix) in to the app’s home directory. Shortcuts to this file
can then be created elsewhere on the user’s system. The function also
creates a new directory /.shiny_run into which is written
the raw batch or bash script (Windows and unix respectively) that runs
the shiny app.
When the shinyDirectory is the current working directory
then the default arguments are sufficient.
library(shinyShortcut)
shinyShortcut()