For some reason even though shinydashboard is downloaded on my AWS instance and all my other shiny apps work perfectly. When I try using any shiny app that uses shinydashboard UI, the UI elements aren't rendered with them.
The app doesn't crash, it runs. But the elements are just not being rendered with the dashboard
Are you sure that you have installed shinydashboard system wide in your aws ubuntu image? have in mind that all your apps run as user shiny and you need to set proper permissions and libraries for that user.
I also use an AWS instance running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS and shinydashboard works normally so most likely is just a configuration issue.
Have you checked the logs for that app? They are located in a directory set in your shiny-server.conf file. The default location is /var/log/shiny-server (at least on centos 7, I'm not sure if this is different on Ubuntu). cd to that folder, and look for log files corresponding to the app you're having trouble with. These log files can help diagnose issues with your app, and it 's always a good place to start troubleshooting when your app won't run on the server.
I also think andresrcs raises a good point. If you installed it running as your own user, it wouldn't be in a package library that the shiny user has access to. It needs to be installed either as root (for a system-wide installation), or as the user shiny.
I've checked the logs in /var/log/shiny-server: there is nothing there.
And the log for the specific app shows:
I also used the following command to install it previously:
sudo su - -c "R -e "install.packages('shinydashboard')""
which I also used for shiny,shinyjs and numerous other packages all which are working fine.
if i haven't installed it system-wide (which I'm not sure how is possible since shiny/other packages all work system wide), how would I go about uninstalling and reinstalling it system-wide?