Is it possible to deploy R rest API on shinyapps.io?

[Antoine Tixier]

Can shinyapps.io be used as an equivalent of heroku for R? There are frameworks like flask for R (plumber or jug) which make it easy to expose R code as API. But can it be deployed to shinyapps.io? It seems it's possible to deploy R to heroku ([link]), but since I'm already paying $1.1K/year for a shinyapps.io account and I know heroku is not free either, I thought I'd double check first :)

[Joshua Spiewak]

While it may be currently possible to deploy a plumber application to shinyapps.io, the application lifecycle may result in undesired behavior.

Official support for hosting R based APIs is on our roadmap, but we do not have a timeframe to share now.

[Antoine Tixier]

Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, I need my APIs to be ready to serve 24/7... The short waiting time that we typically observe when starting a shiny app is fine with humans, but not with programmatic requests... Anyhow, allowing APIs to be deployed in addition to shiny apps would be an excellent feature to have for shinyapps.io, I hope it will be added soon, at least for paying accounts :) Thanks