Hosting An R APP online that updates itself

[simone]

Hi,

I was just looking on some advice for the best way of hosting an R app.

The app in question simply monitors the weather and certain commodities using an API and updates records twice a day. The app then displays results in a word cloud and histogram

As no user interactions are needed as seen in the many Shiny.IO examples. What would be the best way of deploying the app so that this R app can always be live/awake ?

Thanks for all the support
Kind Regards,

[wolfpack]

You could setup a cron job to run the API request and deposit the results in a database. The app could point to the database to pull in results.

[andresrcs]

If I understand your question you need a different hosting approach, a virtual server with R, and a database installed could run a cron job, as suggested by wolfpack.
Amazon Web Services has a free tier if you want to give this approach a try.

[simone]

Hi,

Apologies for the delay in reply.

Thank you so much for clearing up the situation.

So when using a virtual server, would I still need to package my code inside an r shiny package format or could I simply use my current R studio files as they are ?

Appreciate the support to the fullest

[andresrcs]

For retrieving data from the APIs a R script is all what you need, for the word cloud and histogram there are a lot of approaches you can take, a shiny app would be one of them, another one could be rendering a .Rmd file as html and serving the web page through nginx

[simone]

cool. Thanks again for all the help. So if I don't want to render a word cloud and histogram I can simply upload my r scripts to a hosting service like Amazon or Google etc. Are they any that you recommend specifically for R ?

[andresrcs]

Hosting your R script is not like hosting a web page, I was not referring to AWS hosting services but cloud computing services, the idea is that you launch an EC2 instance (virtual server) with any R supported linux distribution, then you install R and all the libraries you are using in your script and then you schedule a cron job for running your script.