Deploying a Golem Shiny App to ShinyApps.io

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I uploaded a Shiny app made with Golem to Shiny Apps for a live demo. I had to troubleshoot a few issues with the deployment so here are the steps I used. I hope this is useful 🙂

After creating a Shiny app skeleton with golem::create_golem("pkgname") you can create an app such as the 2×2 Cobb-Douglas General Equilibrium viewer (code on [GitHub(https://github.com/pachadotdev/cobbdouglasge]).

When I tried to deploy that Cobb-Douglas app to ShinyApps.io I got this message:

> rsconnect::deployApp()
ℹ Capturing R dependencies
The following package(s) were installed from an unknown source:
- cobbdouglasge [0.0.0.9000]
renv may be unable to restore these packages in the future.
Consider reinstalling these packages from a known source (e.g. CRAN).

Error in renv_snapshot_validate_report(valid, prompt, force) : 
  aborting snapshot due to pre-flight validation failure

The cause of the problem is that when testing my app, I installed it locally with devtools::install(), and ShinyApps needs CRAN or GitHub as a source for the dependencies.

To remedy that, I added the following to dev/03_deploy.R without running it:

golem::add_shinyappsio_file()
remotes::install_github("pachadotdev/cobbdouglasge")
use_git_ignore("rsconnect/")
rsconnect::deployApp()

I know pak is the standard these days, but it gave me a compilation error when I tried to install it, so I used remotes.

As an optional step to save space in my ShinyApps account, I created the file .rscignore containing:

.here
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
LICENSE*
NEWS*
README*
dev
man
vignettes
tests

Then I ran the previous chunk that allowed me to deploy the Cobb-Douglas app without errors.