WebR Bundle

A tool for bundling Shiny Apps with WebAssembly.

R Package

Installation

Install the package from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("andyquinterom/webr.bundle")

After installing the package, you need to install the webr-bundle CLI. You can do this by running the following function from R:

webr.bundle::install_from_source()

This will install Rust (if not already installed) and then build and install the webr-bundle CLI.

Usage

Bundle a Shiny App

In order to bundle a Shiny App, it must use renv to manage its dependencies. This is because webr.bundle will use the renv.lock file to discover the dependencies of the app and try to bundle them.

By default, webr.bundle will bundle the app in the current working directory and place the bundled app in the dist directory. You can specify a different app directory by specifying the appdir argument (first argument) and the output directory by specifying the outdir argument (second argument).

# Bundle the app in the current working directory
webr.bundle::build()

# Bundle the app in the my-shiny-app directory and place the bundled app in the my-bundled-app directory
webr.bundle::build("my-shiny-app", "my-bundled-app")

Run a bundled Shiny App

You can run the bundled shiny app with any HTTP server, however, webr.bundle provides a simple HTTP server that can be used to run the app. webr.bundle::serve uses the same API as webr.bundle::build and will build the app if it hasn't been built yet. However, you can also specify a port to bind the HTTP server on.

# Run the bundled app in the current working directory
# on port 8080
webr.bundle::serve()

# Run the shiny app (using WebR) in the my-shiny-app directory
# on port 3000
webr.bundle::serve("my-shiny-app", port = 3000)

CLI

Installation

Build from source

First, install Rust by running the following command in your terminal:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Then, clone this repository and cd into it:

git clone https://github.com/andyquinterom/webr.bundle.git
cd webr.bundle

Finally, build the project:

cargo install --path inst/bin/cli

Now you should be able to run the webr-bundle command.

webr-bundle --help

Usage

Bundle a Shiny App

In order to bundle a Shiny App, it must use renv to manage its dependencies. This is because webr-bundle will use the renv.lock file to discover the dependencies of the app and try to bundle them.

To bundle a Shiny App, we need to cd into the app's directory and run the following command:

webr-bundle build

This will create a new dist directory with the bundled app. If you want to specify a different output directory or a different app directory, you can use (-o, --outdir) and (-a, --appdir) respectively.

# ./
# ├── ./my-shiny-app (Directory containing the Shiny App)
# │   ├── app.R
# │   └── renv.lock
# └── ./my-bundled-app (Output directory)
webr-bundle -o my-bundled-app -a my-shiny-app build

Run a bundled Shiny App

You can run the bundled shiny app with any HTTP server, however, webr-bundle provides a simple HTTP server that can be used to run the app.

webr-bundle serve

This command will build the app and serve it at http://localhost:8080. If you want to specify a different port, you can use (-p, --port).

webr-bundle serve -p 3000

You can still use (-o, --outdir) and (-a, --appdir) to specify the output directory and the app directory respectively.

webr-bundle -o my-bundled-app -a my-shiny-app serve