About this guideĪs mentioned, this guide is designed to explain in a step by step manner how to deploy shinny apps on your own server using Debian 11.

Therefore, I decided to make this guide, covering all those topics and keeping a registry of the links, to help myself in the future and to help anybody who want to try it. Although the sources I found are really helpful, they are lacking a few steps if you set up your own server from scratch, and they are also lacking some sources of where to find when the software gets up to date, providing only old links. That work inspired me to set up my own home server and to write this guide. Of course I did it with the help of Google, with some really useful and clear tutorials I found in marine data science (two links, part 1 and part 2 can be found here) and of course, directly from Digital Ocean’s Guide. Since I’ve been using Debian for the last 10 years, I initialized a Debian 11 server and it was really easy to set up my own cloud service without the use of Docker, and not long later, also my own Shiny server. The big advantage for me is that Digital Ocean gives you the possibility of using what basically is a Virtual Machine with a minimal Linux installation. For good or bad, Heroku canceled the free accounts and thus I decided to try Digital Ocean. I wanted something that I could fully control myself because in the past I have deployed Shiny apps on Heroku using a process that I did not understand well and thus, it was really difficult to debug or modify. There are plenty of source on the web on how to set up your own shiny server, but most of them focus on Docker, which gives you a little less control over it. And so, since Digital Ocean gives you 200 USD of credit for the first 2 months, I decided to try and install my own Shiny server there. On the other hand if you show some apps you can definitely impress your audience. I thought it makes sense since anybody who sees our GitHub account can take whatever they want from it, and at the end is only code, which many recruiters and managers are not familiar with. The speaker was talking about the importance of making your portfolio showing your apps instead of sharing the link to your code as most of us do. Not long after that I took a workshop on Shiny and, although it was too technical with nothing new for me, I learn a couple of things unrelated to R.

A few weeks ago I opened an account on Digital Ocean to start my own cloud server.

Rstudio github tutorial