What it is:

• A template for building Shiny applications and hosting them on Heroku (or other PaaS)
• An automated pipeline for the development lifecyle of an application

What I did:

• Created a minimal example of a Shiny application locally
• Set up renv to responsibly handle package dependencies
• Wrote a Dockerfile to containerize the app for hosting
• Wrote a .travis.yml to automate the CI/CD process to Heroku on each push to Github

What I learned:

• PaaS
• Heroku
• DevOps
• Docker
• Travis CI
• CI/CD pipeline
• Container Registries
• Package management
• Renv

Why it interests me:

• Shiny applications are not necessarily written by people with experience in DevOps or web infrastructure
• Shinyapps.io allows Shiny developers to deploy easily, but with many restrictions at the free tier
• Rather than learning another language or framework, this tool allows R users more freedom in deployment
• I struggled to understand how to get these tools to work together and want to contribute my solution to the R ecosystem