shinyapps-package-dependencies VS shiny-server

https://www.shinyapps.io

Pricing page mentions something about 'active hours', and if you're on 'free' or 'starter' tier, no more users can use the app until next month. Their pricing page doesn't mention anything about 'concurrent' users, but that error message might just be a legacy holdover?

Docker would potentially be an option. Look at https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned. There is also https://www.shinyapps.io/ if you would rather not host the app locally.

https://www.shinyapps.io is fairly simple to implement. (The actual shiny less so )

Yes. The lowest-effort path is going to be a subscription to shinyapps, which comes with basic authentication and some control over compute/memory allocation.

My experience was that it was unreliable. Bit sluggish, and sometimes the app would not start and I would have to restart computer and hope it would work. But I thought I would mention it as an option since it fit your description. Is there a reason why you cannot deploy it to https://www.shinyapps.io/ ?

R Shiny is the way. https://www.shinyapps.io/

Keep in mind that Shinyapps.io is a managed service and comes with some limitations regarding dependencies: required R packages need to be able to run on Ubuntu Linux and cannot rely on graphical display only (Tcl/Tk). Installing packages from Bioconductor needs the repositories set by setRepositories(). If a package has missing system dependencies, you can find available system packages here, or file an issue here.

I don't think this is a problem with Digital Ocean. Some googling makes me think this is a configuration issue with Shiny Server: https://github.com/rstudio/shiny-server/issues/326

Install shiny server (there are multiple methods for this; I'm running on AARM64 VMs so I needed to build from source: https://github.com/rstudio/shiny-server/wiki/Building-Shiny-Server-from-Source). In general, it's easier than you thing as shiny server is (essentially) a node16 application with some pandoc thrown in if you want to display R markdown documents. Important items: don't run as root and ensure shiny server starts on boot. NOTE: even though it's not documented this way, the shiny server source installation process is fundamentally simple.

Found out that shiny-server is able to serve apps made by Quarto, you just have to render them yourself and upload both the .qmd and the html files as per https://github.com/rstudio/shiny-server/pull/531. At least that's something.