Shiny with https

[pep]

Hello,

I operate Shiny Apps (open source) on windows and it works very good. I hope it is possible to configure it additionally to work with https?

Many Thanks in advance.

[andresrcs]

Can you please clarify? Shiny-server can't run natively on Windows so you might be using an alternative approach and we will need to take the specifics into account to give you any meaningful advice.

In general terms, when working with the open source version of shiny server, the most common method to implement SSL encryption is to use a reverse proxy with Nginx or Apache. There are also other approaches for more complex setups that involve orchestrators like shinyproxy or Kubernetes.

[pep]

Yes, I do not use Shiny Server. I only have extended my R instalation with the shiny package. And I start the shiny apps with a R Script like this:
library(shiny)
setwd("D:/zz_ww/Dir_with_ui_and_server") #here are placed the ui.r and sever.r
runApp(host="0.0.0.0",port=83)

Then the shiny app is also remotely accessible, as the port 83 on this windows machine is open for http.
There are also other ports open for http (81, 82, 83, 84, ...)
So at this way I am running by now 5 shiny Apps on different ports in parallel.

Thanks again.

[andresrcs]

Shiny is not really meant to be used at scale on Windows systems, I personally have no experience networking on Windows environments but I think there is an Nginx version for Windows, you might look into that.

If I was you and I had to make it work on a Windows machine, I would use Windows Subsystems for Linux so I can run shiny-server, or use individual Docker containers for my apps (running on Linux images).

[pep]

Thanks a lot. I hope I undrstand correctly:
So, not to use a Shiny server doesn't present a problem. It should be possible to configure Nginx as a reserve proxy to my current Shiny Apps, running on the different http ports? I imanage, I can make fix setting/rules in Nginx like: for https requests on https port 382 the response should be from my internal http port 82; for https requests on port 383-> response from internal http port 83 and so on. I am not sure if my imagination could be real, becouse I think it is not a comon practice to run many instances of a https- Server in parallel. (What I am practicing now with the many Shiny Apps, running in parallel.

And last but not least, I have to ask my windows administrator to open many https ports for access from outside.

Or perhaps there is no need of running many https- Nginx instances, but settings/ rules like: https request to inderx1.html get response from the resource of internal http port 82; requests to index2.html get response from the resource of internal http port 82 and so on. No... this should be witout sense....

Thanks again.