Installation of Shiny Server. "An error has occurred The application failed to start."

[Stefano Mas]

Hi,

I recently installed Shiny server on a headless linux machine running Ubuntu 14.04.

I successfully installed R, shiny and shiny server, and I am able to see in the browser the webpage showing the sampleApp and it says that the shiny server has been installed successfully.

Unfortunately on the right side of the page I cannot see the R plot. Instead I see the text
"

ERROR: An error has occurred. Check your logs or contact the app author for clarification.

"

And I have no idea why it is not working.

When checking the log, I got these lines:

more /var/log/shiny-server.log
[2016-09-12 16:20:58.326] [INFO] shiny-server - Shiny Server v1.4.4.807 (Node.js v0.10.46)
[2016-09-12 16:20:58.328] [INFO] shiny-server - Using pidfile /var/run/shiny-server.pid
[2016-09-12 16:20:58.329] [INFO] shiny-server - Using config file "/etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf"
[2016-09-12 16:20:58.368] [WARN] shiny-server - Running as root unnecessarily is a security risk! You could be running more securely as non-root.
[2016-09-12 16:20:58.371] [INFO] shiny-server - Starting listener on 0.0.0.0:3838
[2016-09-12 16:22:01.622] [INFO] shiny-server - Created bookmark state directory: /var/lib/shiny-server/bookmarks
[2016-09-12 16:22:01.635] [INFO] shiny-server - Created user bookmark state directory: /var/lib/shiny-server/bookmarks/shiny
[2016-09-12 16:22:02.475] [INFO] shiny-server - Error getting worker: Error: The application exited during initialization.
[2016-09-12 16:24:01.891] [INFO] shiny-server - Error getting worker: Error: The application exited during initialization.

I also tried checking if the shiny user had access to R and the required packages to switch to the shiny user using sudo:

sudo su - shiny
R

I was able to call

library(shiny) without any problems.

This is the output from

> installed.packages()
            Package       LibPath                         Version
curl        "curl"        "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.2"
devtools    "devtools"    "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.12.0"
digest      "digest"      "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.6.10"
git2r       "git2r"       "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.15.0"
htmltools   "htmltools"   "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.3.5"
httpuv      "httpuv"      "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.3.3"
httr        "httr"        "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.2.1"
jsonlite    "jsonlite"    "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.0"
markdown    "markdown"    "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.7.7"
memoise     "memoise"     "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.0.0"
mime        "mime"        "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.5"
openssl     "openssl"     "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.9.4"
R6          "R6"          "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "2.1.3"
Rcpp        "Rcpp"        "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.12.7"
rstudioapi  "rstudioapi"  "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.6"
shiny       "shiny"       "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.14"
sourcetools "sourcetools" "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.1.2"
whisker     "whisker"     "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "0.3-2"
withr       "withr"       "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.0.2"
xtable      "xtable"      "/usr/local/lib/R/site-library" "1.8-2"

... cut ...

and here's the output from

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.0.2 (2013-09-25)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
 [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
 [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
 [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C
 [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] shiny_0.14

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] digest_0.6.10   htmltools_0.3.5 httpuv_1.3.3    mime_0.5

[5] R6_2.1.3        Rcpp_0.12.7     tools_3.0.2     xtable_1.8-2


My options for debugging are limited, since there is no GUI in the machine and I cannot install Rstudio. Does anybody have an idea on what can be wrong? Many thanks in advance

[max...@gmail.com]

I met the same failure in the index.html, I can see the plot, but cannot see the code, where show a error message "Error: An error has occurred. Check your logs or contact the app author for clarification." I'm sure the "rmarkdown" package has been installed.

then I go to my app, which works well before, but after deployed to shiny server, I see may error messages as "Error: An error has occurred. Check your logs or contact the app author for clarification." then I go to my pc without server, it works well.

Who can show me how to fix this problem? Thanks.

在 2016年9月12日星期一 UTC+8下午11:36:11，Stefano Mas写道：

[Peter Tyrrell]

Hi guys,

I'm also having a similar problem, App working well locally and shinyapp.io, but encountering the same error at this stage. 

Peter

[rjss]

This post may help https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shiny-discuss/9VTc0B4Yo4Q

[rjss]

Also some information here http://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/sanitize-errors.html

[Nan Zhou]

The same problem (http://139.129.132.159:3838/). Please provide a solution.

CentOS 7 (no GUI, cloud server)

R 3.3.1

Shiny-server 1.4.6

Interestingly, on my personal laptop, ubuntu 16.04, I installed and configure shiny-server the same way, it works perfectly!

[Joe Cheng]

Can you check the log files under /var/log/shiny-server/*.log?

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[Joe Cheng]

Also, if you would prefer to see real error messages in your app instead of generic ones, you can add "sanitize_errors off;" to your /etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf, then restart shiny server (or send SIGHUP if you don't want to interrupt the process).

[Nan Zhou]

Hi Joe, thanks a lot. According to your advice, I first added "sanitize_errors off;" to the shiny-server.conf, then I restarted the shiny-server. Please find the log here (http://139.129.132.159:3838/log.txt)

Then, refresh (http://139.129.132.159:3838/), I got more specific error info

  1) Error, cannot open file 'Rplots.pdf'

  2) Error: dev.control() called without an open graphics device