{"id":387,"date":"2021-07-20T14:00:59","date_gmt":"2021-07-20T14:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/terrabioappdev.wpenginepowered.com\/try-out-r-shiny-apps-in-terra\/"},"modified":"2023-12-27T04:54:51","modified_gmt":"2023-12-27T04:54:51","slug":"try-out-r-shiny-apps-in-terra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terra.bio\/try-out-r-shiny-apps-in-terra\/","title":{"rendered":"Try out R Shiny apps in Terra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the <\/span>rollout of Rstudio and Bioconductor<\/span><\/a> last quarter, our Interactive Analysis team has been hard at work expanding the capabilities of the cloud environments framework that supports running RStudio, Jupyter Notebook and <\/span>Galaxy<\/span><\/a> in Terra. Most recently, they added the ability to launch R Shiny apps from Terra’s built-in RStudio environment, opening up some really exciting possibilities for taking interactive data visualization in Terra to the next level.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The R package that launched a thousand COVID-19 trackers<\/span><\/h3>\n

If you’re not already familiar with Shiny, it’s an R package developed by the makers of RStudio that enables data scientists to develop interactive web apps for data exploration and visualization without requiring any software engineering or web development experience. The apps made with Shiny can be shared as just code or as pre-built containers, and can be run on a local machine or hosted on a web server, in various forms: as standalone web pages, embedded in <\/span>R Markdown documents<\/span><\/a>, or set up as <\/span>dashboards<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Example of an open-source R Shiny app<\/a> developed by the Manning Lab<\/a> to visualize whole-genome association data.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Thanks to this combination of flexibility, power, and ease of use, R Shiny apps have rapidly become hugely popular as a way to make custom data visualizations available to a wide audience. It’s now increasingly common to see researchers publish an R Shiny app as part of a paper to enable readers to explore their dataset and results interactively. And based on some admittedly anecdotal googling, R Shiny seems to be the technology most commonly used across the world for making dashboards that track various dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic \u2014 which itself seems to have become the top example used in online data science visualization tutorials. (Seriously, <\/span>there are so many<\/span><\/a>…)<\/span><\/p>\n

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How it works in general, and in Terra<\/span><\/h3>\n

In its simplest form, an R Shiny app consists of a file of R code called “app.R”, which may be accompanied by some accessory files. Technically you can launch the app from the command line with the appropriate commands, but the RStudio interface makes it extra easy with a literal “Run App” button that pops up when you open the app.R file.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Terra’s built-in RStudio environment comes with the Shiny package pre-installed and is configured to handle the Run App function appropriately, so you can effectively follow the same procedure as for launching the app from RStudio on a local machine. Doing so will open a new browser window for the app, at which point you’re free to play with the data in whatever fun way the app offers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s a demo video of what it looks like to launch an R Shiny app from an RStudio environment in Terra (<\/span>workspace<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>app<\/span><\/a> courtesy of the <\/span>Manning Lab<\/span><\/a>). To keep it short, we shortened the sequences showing package installation steps; for detailed instructions, see the <\/span>workspace dashboard<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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