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I am trying to host an R shiny server locally for others to access outside of my network. I was following along with an R-blogger post here. I think I need to edit the shiny-server.conf file and add the IP I want to use but I'm not having any luck. I saw on a couple of different posts that you need to edit the line in the listen line in the server.conf file to something like listen 3838 [IP you want to use];. I'm just struggling to get this to work. When I change that line, the shiny-server still uses my local IP address. In the R-blogger post, they talk about obtaining dynamic IP address or using a free dynamic DNS through duckdns. I'm just not very familiar with networking and I have no idea what I am doing here. I set up a site using duckdns and it seems to use my IP that I can find from whatismyip. I really thought this was going to be an easy thing to set up so some of my colleagues can look at some graphs I made in R. However, I have spent hours trying to get this to work so any help is greatly appreciated.

Just a heads up, I am using a raspberry pi 4 that is running ubuntu 20.10 for this and I have set up the port forwarding already. I have also open port 3838 on the raspberry pi using sudo ufw allow 3838

neuron
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    (1) Questions about networking are [off-topic](https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic) for StackOverflow, they should be posted instead on [Server Fault](https://serverfault.com/). (2) To be honest, though, if you know little about networking/sysadmin and are opening up your personal server to the internet, you are introducing a rather large liability to your computer and home/office network. While I do not believe that `shiny` has security exploits (yet?), do not rely on that. For this reason, (3) I **strongly** urge a hosted provider (shinyapps.io?). – r2evans Aug 12 '21 at 13:51
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    Setting up the shiny server to listen externally is easy. Making your raspi available from the internet with a static IP or a dyndns URL will be much harder - and maybe impossible if your ISP offers only CGNAT. Also this has nothing to do with shiny. – AEF Aug 12 '21 at 13:54
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    @r2evans using shinyapps.io was a significantly faster solution and was exactly what I needed for a small project like this. Thank you – neuron Aug 12 '21 at 15:09
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    I'm glad it helps. Please be careful with opening up your rasp-pi4 with unencrypted, not-secured applications like this. Further, before you open even one of them, make sure that your router/firewall are up-to-date and only forward specific ports, and then make sure that your rasp-pi4 is also up-to-date and locked down. This seems gargantuan, but not doing so is analogous to walking away from your house in NYC with the front door wide open: eventually somebody will see it and get "curious". Just some friendly advice, please be careful. – r2evans Aug 12 '21 at 15:15

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