How to stop running shiny app by closing the browser window?

Question

I have deployed an app in shinyapps.io and its working fine.

I am running the app for only 5 minutes, but when I checked the metrics it shows a running time for about 0.7 hours. I found that there is a default idle time of 15 minutes, which I have changed to 5 minutes (minimum). I also noticed that, even after closing the browser window of the shiny app, it still shows the app as running in my dashboard.

I assume that the app doesn't stop running when a browser window is closed and it will stop only when the idle time condition is met.

Is there a way to stop the shiny app when the browser window is closed? Would the following piece of code work in this instance?

session$onSessionEnded(function() {
    stopApp()
  })

Answer 1

I'm not aware of shinyapps.io, but in R (as your tag shows) you can indeed stop a shinyApp through the onSessionEnded. The following is a minimal working example.

rm(list=ls())

library(shiny)

doshiny <- function() {
  app=shinyApp(
    ui = fluidPage(
      textInput("textfield", "Insert some text", value = "SomeText")
    ),
    server = function(input, output, session) {
      session$onSessionEnded(function() {
        stopApp()
      })
    }
  )
  runApp(app)
}

openshiny <- function() {
  doshiny()
  print("Finished.")
}

openshiny()

Answer 2

I found this excellent code which does the job. Basically, you do like so:

library(shiny)
library(shinyjs)

jscode <- "shinyjs.closeWindow = function() { window.close(); }"

ui <- fluidPage(
  useShinyjs(),
  extendShinyjs(text = jscode, functions = c("closeWindow")),
  actionButton("close", "Close window")
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {
  observeEvent(input$close, {
    js$closeWindow()
    stopApp()
  })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Note though that closing the browser window through JavaScript may be prohibited. But this is another discussion.

Answer 3

I have added this inactivity JS code to help me with some of my shiny apps which are IDLE. The code is pretty much self explanatory where I track down the mouse movements and clicks. Note that this app will close after 5 seconds.

library(shiny)
library(leaflet)

inactivity <- "function idleTimer() {
  var t = setTimeout(logout, 5000);
  window.onmousemove = resetTimer; // catches mouse movements
  window.onmousedown = resetTimer; // catches mouse movements
  window.onclick = resetTimer;     // catches mouse clicks
  window.onscroll = resetTimer;    // catches scrolling
  window.onkeypress = resetTimer;  //catches keyboard actions

  function logout() {
    window.close();  //close the window
  }

  function resetTimer() {
    clearTimeout(t);
    t = setTimeout(logout, 5000);  // time is in milliseconds (1000 is 1 second)
  }
}
idleTimer();"


ui <- fluidPage(
  tags$script(inactivity),  
  actionButton("recalc","recalc"),
  leafletOutput("mymap")

)

server <- shinyServer(function(input,output,session){

  points <- eventReactive(input$recalc, {
    cbind(rnorm(40) * 2 + 13, rnorm(40) + 48)
  }, ignoreNULL = FALSE)

  output$mymap <- renderLeaflet({
    leaflet() %>%
      addProviderTiles(providers$Stamen.TonerLite,options = providerTileOptions(noWrap = TRUE)) %>% 
      addMarkers(data = points())
  })

})
runApp(list(ui = ui, server = server))