Example: A Shiny Application

This example demonstrates how to create and run a Shiny application and view the associated UI while in an active session.

Create a new, blank project and run an R console. Create the files, ui.R and server.R, in the project, and copy the contents of the following example files provided by Shiny by RStudio:

# ui.R

library(shiny)

# Define UI for application that draws a histogram
shinyUI(fluidPage(

  # Application title
  titlePanel("Hello Shiny!"),

  # Sidebar with a slider input for the number of bins
  sidebarLayout(
    sidebarPanel(
      sliderInput("bins",
                  "Number of bins:",
                  min = 1,
                  max = 50,
                  value = 30)
    ),

    # Show a plot of the generated distribution
    mainPanel(
      plotOutput("distPlot")
    )
  )
))

# server.R 

library(shiny)

# Define server logic required to draw a histogram
shinyServer(function(input, output) {

  # Expression that generates a histogram. The expression is
  # wrapped in a call to renderPlot to indicate that:
  #
  #  1) It is "reactive" and therefore should re-execute automatically
  #     when inputs change
  #  2) Its output type is a plot

  output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
    x    <- faithful[, 2]  # Old Faithful Geyser data
    bins <- seq(min(x), max(x), length.out = input$bins + 1)

    # draw the histogram with the specified number of bins
    hist(x, breaks = bins, col = 'darkgray', border = 'white')
  })
})

Run the following code in the interactive workbench prompt to install the Shiny package, load the library into the engine, and run the Shiny application.

install.packages('shiny') 

library('shiny')

runApp(port=as.numeric(Sys.getenv("CDSW_PUBLIC_PORT")), host="127.0.0.1", launch.browser="FALSE")

Finally, click the grid icon in the upper right hand corner of the Cloudera Data Science Workbench web application, and select the Shiny UI, Hello Shiny!, from the dropdown. The UI will be active as long as the session is still running.