How to embed a shiny application into an Rmarkdown html document

Question

I would like to create an html document with RMarkdown, containing text, Rcode and somewhere in between a shiny application.

• I thought of using asis=TRUE for the shinyApp(ui, server) block, but RStudio only renders the Rmd file, if I add runtime: shiny to the YAML-Header.
• If I do so, no html is created, but I can move to browser view.
• If I look at the source code in the browser view , I still don't see the entire html code.
• If I check the generated temporary file, I was not able to find the html file representing the entire RMarkdown document.

How to generate html-code from the shinyApp function? Or: How to generate an html file, from RMarkdown containing a shiny app instead of e.g. a plot

I hope you have some idea for me.

Answer 1

I don't really understand what you mean by "a shiny application". If you have already set up a server side application, i.e. others can access your application via URL, you can try the following approach.

See https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/web-pages-and-shiny-apps.html, second paragraph.

A related function is knitr::include_app(), which is very similar to include_url(), and it was designed for embedding Shiny apps via their URLs in the output.

Answer 2

'Note: If you are familiar with R Markdown, you might expect RStudio to save an HTML version of an interactive document in your working directory. However, this only works with static HTML documents. Each interactive document must be served by a computer that manages the document. As a result, interactive documents cannot be shared as a standalone HTML file.'

https://shiny.posit.co/r/articles/build/interactive-docs/

Answer 3

If I understand your question correctly then maybe the following URL could be of help for you:

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/shiny-start.html

As you can see: You don't have to follow the Shiny skeleton template. The only thing to do: You have to add the line runtime: shiny into the YAML-header and publish the .Rmd file in the normal way, e.g. you have to include a standard r code snippet in your RMarkdown document where you can write your shiny code.

I hope this is helpful.