[R] Packaged exe and Shiny

[Jeff Newmiller]

IMO the best short answer is don't target making an install package or msi at all... the obstacles are quite significant. Aim for building most of your capabilities in packages and having people install them. You can setup an in-house package repo to simplify this and give them a startup script that configures their R environment.

There is also the option to use R-Portable [1] but this leads to massive deployment files that don't upgrade easily.

I also think that when the time crunch happens many people will go to the internet and copy-paste solutions that you would be unlikely to have anticipated. Closing off that scary console completely will keep you in the hot seat indefinitely, whereas giving them the option to go around your UI lets more resources be allocated later.

[1] https://www.r-bloggers.com/deploying-desktop-apps-with-r/amp/

On September 10, 2018 3:17:02 PM PDT, Jim Lemon <drjimlemon using gmail.com> wrote:
>Hi Kevin,
>It might be just as easy to write R scripts that would do basic
>analyses. Users could "source" these scripts in an R session or from
>the command line. The scripts would be much more compact than the .exe
>files that you describe.
>
>Jim
>
>On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 8:06 AM Kevin Kowitski via R-help
><r-help using r-project.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hey Everyone,
>>
>>   I do not know if this topic has been covered, I'm sure it must
>have, but is there a good environment for packaging R code into a
>distributed exe. (which includes all of the required libraries, etc.)? 
>I have seen that Shiny is a good GUI / Web library for sharing R
>programs, but I have never used it.
>>
>> What is the groups input on this?
>>
>> My goal is to create some basic tools (with interfaces) at work for
>analyzing .csv files and generating basic graphs and output csv files.
>These tools would be distributed to team members to have on their
>desktops.   I considered doing this in Java, but I am more well versed
>in R so it would be quicker for me to whip up the varying tools in R
>than re-learning Java.
>>
>> Thank you!
>>
>> -Kevin
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-- 
Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.