How to test that a shiny app is deployed using testthat?

[Leonardo Collado Torres]

Hi,

How would you test that a shiny app is deployed? I thought of using Rcurl::url.exists() which works if the app is runnin, but not if it's sleeping. For example:

> library(testthat)

>         expect_equal(

+             RCurl::url.exists('https://jhubiostatistics.shinyapps.io/recount/'),

+             TRUE

+         )

Error: RCurl::url.exists("https://jhubiostatistics.shinyapps.io/recount/") not equal to TRUE.

1 element mismatch

> options(width = 120)

> devtools::session_info()

Session info -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 setting  value                                 

 version  R version 3.3.0 RC (2016-05-01 r70572)

 system   x86_64, darwin13.4.0                  

 ui       AQUA                                  

 language (EN)                                  

 collate  en_US.UTF-8                           

 tz       America/New_York                      

 date     2016-07-13                            

Packages ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 package  * version  date       source        

 bitops     1.0-6    2013-08-17 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 crayon     1.3.2    2016-06-28 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 devtools   1.12.0   2016-06-24 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 digest     0.6.9    2016-01-08 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 magrittr   1.5      2014-11-22 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 memoise    1.0.0    2016-01-29 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 R6         2.1.2    2016-01-26 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 RCurl      1.95-4.8 2016-03-01 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 testthat * 1.0.2    2016-04-23 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

 withr      1.0.2    2016-06-20 CRAN (R 3.3.0)

Interactively, I can force the app to be running by using utils::browseURL() first, but that won't work when testing in a non-interactive environment. Such as with:

if(interactive()) {

    ## Open shiny app when running test in interactive mode.

    ## This will force the app to be available, which will then run the test

    ## successfully.

    browseURL('https://jhubiostatistics.shinyapps.io/recount/')

    test_that('Shiny app is up', {

        expect_equal(

            RCurl::url.exists('https://jhubiostatistics.shinyapps.io/recount/'),

            TRUE

        )

    })

}

Thank you!

Leo

[Tareef Kawaf]

Yes, unfortunately you would need to use a tool like phantomjs to hit your application and start it up.  Recall that applications are put to sleep when they aren't receiving traffic, unless you specifically tune them to stay up for a longer period of time.

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[Leonardo Collado Torres]

Ok, thank you for the info!

Best,

Leo