Shiny app as package: css & all www/ directory stuff

Question

I'm trying to convert a Shiny app into an R package and I am having trouble with all things regarding the www directory as well as "loose" files.

My shiny app works perfectly but when I try to "package it", it doesn't work.

My shiny app directory:

+---my_shiny
|   +---app.R
|   +---utils.R
|   +---www
|       +---style.css
|       +---icon1.png
|       +---icon2.png
|       +---icon3.png
|       +---font.ttf

My code starts like this:

library(hrbrthemes)
library(tidyverse)
library(plotly)

source(here::here("utils.R"))

theme_set(theme_personalized())
update_geom_defaults("text", list(family = theme_get()$text$family))

ui <- navbarPage(
  "Example",
  id = "navbar",
  theme = "style.css",

Now I down't know how to convert it into a package where I can call myapp::appdemo() and it deploys my app.

+---myapp
|   +---DESCRIPTION
|   +---NAMESPACE  
|   +---R
|       +---appdemo.R
|   +---inst
|       +---shiny/
|           +---app.R
|           +---utils.R
|           +---style.css
|           +---icon1.png
|           +---icon2.png
|           +---icon3.png
|           +---font.ttf

But it doesn't work and I don't know how to make it to.

Have you had a look [here](https://mastering-shiny.org/scaling-packaging.html)? But I admit that this chapter is not very detailed. The only thing I see in your folder structure is that you use `inst/shiny` instead of `inst/www`. Maybe it helps if you change that? — starja, Aug 13 '20 at 20:00
Yes, I did! I think that chapter is not finished yet and hence de "inst/www?". I partially solved the problem by: (i) putting the app and utils on R/ and (ii) by publishing the images online and reading them from the url. The css part is not that simple (I tryied inserting the css on the app itself) :( — Paula, Aug 14 '20 at 13:49
When you install the package, a folder in `inst` gets copied to the higher level, so `inst/www` should be correct (or did I miss a change that `www` is now called `shiny`?) — starja, Aug 14 '20 at 14:02

wurli · Accepted Answer · 2023-08-23T21:50:33.830

I reverse-engineered the approach used by the {golem} framework to find a method which seems to work:

Everything which you would normally put in www should now go in inst/app/www. In package development, the inst folder is used for arbitrary additional files that you want include in your package.

Add inst/app/www as a 'resource path' as follows:

resources <- system.file("app/www", package = "my-package-name")
addResourcePath("www", resources)

Use the following in your app's UI to embed the resources:

tags$head(

  # Javascript resources
  htmltools::htmlDependency(
    name = "resources",
    version = "0.0.1",
    src = resources,
    script = list.files(resources, pattern = "\\.js$", recursive = TRUE),
    package = NULL,
    all_files = TRUE
  ),

  # CSS resources
  lapply(
    list.files(resources, pattern = "\\.css$", recursive = TRUE),
    function(x) tags$link(href = file.path("www", x), rel = "stylesheet")
  )

)

Shiny app as package: css & all www/ directory stuff

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