"SSL connect error" on shinyapps.io

shiny shinyapps.io
,
1

I have been using an app to read from the Uniprot database
using rtracklayer::readGFF()
e.g:
rtracklayer::readGFF('https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P61769.191.gff')

One day I started getting an error:

Error: An error has occurred. Check your logs or contact the app author for clarification.

the logs report this:

2021-09-29T09:51:29.629141+00:00 shinyapps[4754072]: trying URL 'https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P61769.191.gff'
2021-09-29T09:51:30.032876+00:00 shinyapps[4754072]: Warning in download.file(fp, filepath2[i]) :
2021-09-29T09:51:30.032878+00:00 shinyapps[4754072]: URL 'https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P61769.191.gff': status was 'SSL connect error'
2021-09-29T09:51:30.034831+00:00 shinyapps[4754072]: Warning: Error in download.file: cannot open URL 'https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P61769.191.gff'

I can reproduce it, deploying a new app on shinyappsio
with this minimal example:

library(rtracklayer)
library(dplyr)

#UI
ui <- fluidPage(
  shiny::flowLayout(
    shiny::mainPanel(
      shiny::dataTableOutput("output")
    )
  )
)

# Server
server <- function(input, output) {
  
  output$output <- shiny::renderDataTable({
    rtracklayer::readGFF('https://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P61769.191.gff') %>% 
      as_tibble()
  }) 
}

# App 
shinyApp(ui = ui, 
         server = server)

NOTE: The app works if run locally.
The same app used to work also when deployed on shinyappsio, until one day it stopped.

The error has nothing to do with rtracklayer of course.
if I use a simple
readr::read_lines(url)
or
httr::GET(url)

I get the following error:

Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory: error:14094410:SSL routines:ssl3_read_bytes:sslv3 alert handshake failure

Any idea?

2

Probably the ssl library is too old on the host machine or in the container? You can check it with

curl::curl_version()