Sharing www directory across Shiny apps

shiny
1

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to share Shiny's www directory across apps, such that I can share a stylesheet. My directory structure is such that I have a Git repo that contains many Shiny apps. I also have a static assets directory in that repo. One might imagine that its directory structure is:

shiny-app-repo/
├── app1/
│   ├── server.R
│   └── ui.R
├── app2/
│   ├── server.R
│   └── ui.R
├── app3/
│   ├── server.R
│   └── ui.R
├── assets/
│   └── style.css

I'm aware that all the Shiny apps expect to have a www directory inside of them. Naturally, I'd prefer to not need to copy/paste/rename the assets directory.

I've tried using addResourcePath, i.e. addResourcePath('www', '../assets'), but that doesn't seem to work. I've also tried pointing my UI code at the shared directory, i.e. tags$link(rel = "stylesheet", type = "text/css", href = "../../assets/style.css"), but that also does not seem to work for me.

What's the recommended way of telling each Shiny app to find this assets directory?

Many thanks.

2

If you're on macOS or Linux, maybe you could cheat and have symlinks to a common www folder?

(this would def. be a last-ditch solution!)

3

Take a look at the addResourcePath function. You can use it to mount any directory to a Shiny URL.

1 Like
4

This is a nice idea that had somehow eluded me. I will set that up as part of our build script.

5

That was the first thing I tried, but for whatever reason this wasn't playing nicely with the static assets. I'm not quite sure why, as there was little debug information available.