How to deploy an R Shiny webapp with Docker on Render

Lately, a lot of people have been asking me about how to deploy web apps using Docker, Inc for their hobby projects. So to help people I threw this quick tutorial about how to deploy an R Shiny web app on Render using their free tier.

Video tutorial

In this tutorial, we are creating a simple R Shiny web app, running it locally, hosting it locally via Docker (desktop), and deploying via Docker and render.com. Sounds fun, right? Let's have a look!

Running (locally)

• Clone this repo
  git clone git@github.com:jameshtwose/rshiny-docker-render.git
• Run the app
  Rscript app.R
• Open the app in your browser
  http://localhost:5000

Running (Docker/ local)

• Build the Docker image
  docker build -t rshiny-docker-render .
• Run the Docker image
  docker run -d -p 5000:5000 rshiny-docker-render
• Open the app in your browser
  http://localhost:5000

Deploying (render.com)

• Create a new web service
• Select "Docker" as the environment
• Select "GitHub" as the deployment method
• Select this repo
• Deploy the app

The GitHub repo can be found here: https://github.com/jameshtwose/rshiny-docker-render
And the live demo can be found here: https://rshiny-docker-render.onrender.com/