Shiny Server not showing application and no logs at all

[Kareem Amr]

So I built a web app with shiny which is functional and tested locally, I put it on a  remote machine where I installed all dependencies and verified that the shiny server sample apps all work. But for some reason my app doesn't show up and I looked in the logs directory but there are no log files at all. It just shows an error message in the browser. p.s.: I'm using the root user to do this. Can someone help?

[Luca Valnegri]

hi there,

the standard way is to copy the app files into a subdirectory of the shiny server, so I guess you've copied your file(s) in a folder like /srv/shiny-server/myapp/ 

but without any further info it's really difficult to understand what's going on, for example what error in the browser?

you can try to change your log folder adding/changing the following lines to the shiny server config file (/etc/shiny-server/shiny-server.conf)

# log all Shiny outputs to files in this directory
log_dir /usr/local/share/public/shiny_server/logs;
# change permission on log dir (if using a group shared folder 0644 is OK)
log_file_mode 0644;

you could avoid using the root user if you set up a group and put your user and the shiny user in it, adding ownership of /srv/shiny-server/. In this case you can manage files with your own user. 

moreover, you can define a "group" folder somewhere outside your user and the shiny folders to be used as a shared directory. 

more info here https://github.com/lvalnegri/workshops-setup_cloud_analytics_machine#add-public

hope this helps

Luca