Is it possible to host interactive R Markdown files on Github Pages?

Question

As the title says, I would like to create posts on Github Pages that are interactive R Markdown files (meaning that it has Shiny apps embedded in it). Is this possible to do in Github Pages? If so, how can I do it; and if not, what's the best (free) way to host interactive RMD/Shiny pages?

Answer 1

While it's not possible to host fully-fledged Shiny apps on Github pages (Indeed, as @Gregor suggested, shinyapps.io is useful for this), the devs for Shiny have been working to make some of the functionality run completely on the client-side via htmlwidgets.

Here is a simple example running on Github pages:

README.Rmd

## Example of displaying htmlwidgets on a Github pages site

```{r}
# Source: http://www.htmlwidgets.org/showcase_plotly.html
library(plotly)
p <- ggplot(data = diamonds, aes(x = cut, fill = clarity)) +
            geom_bar(position = "dodge")
ggplotly(p)
```

Rendered HTML

(Live version: Github pages htmlwidget demo)

For more complex interactions, including communicating between widgets entirely on the client-side, check out Joe Cheng's recent crosstalk demo from UserR! 2016.