[R-sig-Debian] Running open source shiny server on Debian (redirecting from R-help)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 20 July 2026 at 18:14, Chris Evans via R-SIG-Debian wrote:
| [Redirected from R-help at Dirk Eddelbuettel's wise advice!]
| 
| I am a retired clinician continuing to do pro bono research but have 
| zero research income.  However, I have run a little public service shiny 
| server (https://shiny.psyctc.org) since early 2024 and want to continue 
| with it and expand it.  (See 
| https://www.psyctc.org/Analysing_shiny_usage.html for too much 
| information about its use if that interests you!)
| 
| Recently my excellent ISP wanted to upgrade their various servers, 
| including that one.  They are pretty much FLOSS only and happy that I 
| use R but they are not R or shiny experts though, in my view, superb for 
| general ISP Email and web server support on Debian.
| 
| They said that they were finding it hard to be sure of running the open 
| source shiny server on Debian and I can find no recent information on 
| this and see that Posit say that their OS shiny server is only 
| installable on:
|     Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and higher
|     Ubuntu 22.04 and higher (LTS releases only)
|     SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7
| (from https://docs.posit.co/shiny-server/)
| 
| They did do the upgrade of the server to bookworm and the shiny server 
| is now on R 4.2.2.  The apps are all runnning OK (and they are mostly 
| very simple) but this is clearly not good to be using a version of R 
| that is four years old.
| 
| So could anyone point me to any information about installing the OS 
| shiny server on Debian bookworm or trixie and using a recent R.
| 
| I am asking here before stepping into the time consuming process of 
| installing a VM manager on my own Ubuntu machine, and then installing 
| bookworm or trixie as VMs and trying to explore this myself.  I know 
| that would be taking me to the limits of my competences (I am a 
| psychotherapist and fairly competent data analyst not a server manager 
| or programmer!) and using up hours of work time!!
| 
| TIA and thanks for umpteen (>=17) years of learning from r-help,

You are being careful, but possibly overly so.

If you step back and look at how third-party (commercial, sometimes 'free as
in beer', sometimes open source) .deb packages are provided you will noticed
that there _frequently_ is only one source of .deb binaries for the different
operating systems (meaning we may run "debian" on ubuntu or vice versa).

The key here is that these (commercial, mostly) .deb packages generally
_bundle_ their own shared libraries instead of relying on the host. That is
i) different from these distro do, ii) a wastse of diskspace, iii) easier for
them and iv) very common!  E.g. on the (ubuntu 26.04) machine that I am
typing this I am running the following (commerical, mostly, some "open sauce"
and installed as a binary for convenience) packages all supplied at a .deb

   brave (another browser)
   chrome
   docker
   duckdb
   ollama
   positron
   quarto
   rstudio (desktop)
   rstudio-server
   spotify
   syncthing
   zoom

At least some of these are technically from a 'debian' repo but as stated,
these third-party repos are *very* different from the normal package in the
repo and generally do not use packages _at all_.

In short, you should have no risk.

But I am not running the Debian release you are looking at so I cannot "say
this for certain". I can be reasonably close, based on over three decades
with all this.

Lastly, you could also consider making yourself sleep better at night (if
that matters) and use Ubuntu as a host OS. Also open source, and the shiny
server then "runs natively".

Hth, Dirk
 
| Chris
| 
| ---
| Chris Evans
| Visiting Professor, UDLA, Quito, Ecuador
| Work web site: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/
| CORE site: http://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/
| Personal site: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/
| 
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-- 
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd using debian.org