Up & Running

Simple ‘Hello World’ with R + Shiny

The pathway to Hello World is straightforward. You’ll need to install R. For Mac users the simplest way is Homebrew. If not, you can always get it from CRAN. You get an R console by simply typing R at your terminal of choice.

Next, you’ll want to create a file called app.R with the code below. The main driver behind everything we will be doing is an R package called Shiny. What exactly is this magical package?

Shiny is an open source R package that provides an elegant and powerful web framework for building web applications using R. Shiny helps you turn your analyses into interactive web applications without requiring HTML, CSS, or JavaScript knowledge.

Once you’ve done that. You can run the app by invoking R and typing:

library(shiny)

shiny::runApp()

Pretty easy right? Welp, that’s only the beginning.