R Markdown with Shiny Server change host parameter

Question

I am running RStudio on a server and I created a RMarkdown (.Rmd) file. It works fine if I create it as a static HTML but it does not work if I want it to be interactive (by adding runtime:shiny).

The issue is that when I add runtime:shiny and press the Run Document button the application will try to open at 127.0.0.1:xxxx (here xxxx is a random port). In order to make it work I would have to be able to change the host parameter to '0.0.0.0'. This is an option in the runApp function from the shiny package but I don't know how to add this option in RMarkdown.

Can anyone help me with this?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The ::run command from rmarkdown invokes shiny::runApp internally. You can set the option shiny.host before running the document:

options(shiny.host="0.0.0.0")
rmarkdown::run("myfile.Rmd")

You an also pass arbitrary paramters to runApp, so this should work too:

rmarkdown::run("myfile.Rmd", shiny_args=list(host="0.0.0.0"))

Neither of these will work with the Run Document button; that button starts a new R session in which to render the document. To change the shiny.host option in that session, you'll need to add the option to your .Rprofile.

Answer 2

Set the default values you want to initialize in (~/.Rprofile) under user directory

Sys.setenv(TZ = "UTC")  # for Timezone
options(shiny.port = 9999)