Posit Academy — Shiny for R

Course files for the Posit Academy Getting Started with Shiny for R course. This single repository contains everything you need for the course, organized into two top-level folders:

• tutorials/ — starter files for the Shiny IDE tutorials. These tutorials run in your browser but ask you to work with files in your IDE (Positron or RStudio) alongside the tutorial.
• milestones/ — the starter files for your weekly project milestones. Each week you work through a milestone in your IDE, applying the skills from that week's tutorials. The milestone instructions live in the course site (open the "Milestone N" tutorial in your browser); the files you edit and run live here.

By accessing these Posit Academy course materials, you agree to Posit's End User License Agreement and Learning Services Agreement.

Setup

Clone this repository in a Terminal on Posit Workbench:

git clone https://github.com/rstudio/academy-shiny.git

You only need to do this once for the course. See the Set Up Your Project & Tutorials tutorial in the course site for a step-by-step walkthrough.

tutorials/

Starter files for the IDE tutorials. Each folder contains the starter .R app file(s) and the data/ files needed for that tutorial.

Folder	Starter Files	Tutorial
tutorials/01-shiny-welcome_to_shiny/	ex01-app.R	Welcome to Shiny: your first app, UI & layouts, input widgets
tutorials/02-shiny-basics_of_reactivity/	ex01-app.R, ex02-app.R, ex03-app.R	Basics of reactivity: outputs, the server function, the reactive graph
tutorials/03-shiny-more_reactivity/	ex01-app.R, ex02-app.R, ex03-app.R	More reactivity: reactive(), observe(), req(), and bindEvent()
tutorials/04-shiny-dynamic_modern_ui/	ex01-app.R, ex02-app.R, ex03-app.R	Dynamic and modern UIs: bslib cards, value boxes, and renderUI()
tutorials/05-shiny-customization_and_theming/	bslib-app.R, shiny-app.R, colors-app.R, darkmode-app.R	Customization and theming: Bootstrap versions, bs_theme(), dark mode, thematic
tutorials/06-shiny-workflow_and_deployment/	app.R	Workflow and deployment: organizing an app and publishing to Posit Connect Cloud
tutorials/07-shiny-more_interactive_visualizations/	leaflet-app.R, plotly-app.R, dt-app.R	More interactive visualizations: leaflet maps, plotly plots, DT tables (optional)
tutorials/08-shiny-production_ready_apps/	testing.R, app.R	Production-ready apps: testing with shinytest2 (optional)
tutorials/09-shiny-user_input_validation/	validation-app.R, feedback-app.R	User input & validation: req(), validate(), and user feedback (optional)

How to use the tutorial files

When a tutorial asks you to open a starter file, navigate to the corresponding folder inside tutorials/ and open the .R file in your IDE. To run an app:

• RStudio: click the Run App button in the editor toolbar.
• Positron: click the Run Shiny App play button at the top of the editor. (Every app file here ends in -app.R, which is what tells Positron the file is a Shiny app.)

In both IDEs you can also run the app from the Console with a lesson-folder-qualified path, e.g.

shiny::runApp("tutorials/01-shiny-welcome_to_shiny/ex01-app.R")

The play button and runApp() both work from the repo root because they switch to the app's folder while the app runs, so the app can find its data/ files. (Avoid an argument-less shiny::runApp(), and avoid running an app file line-by-line in the Console — in both cases R stays in the repo root and cannot find data/weather.csv.)

milestones/

The starter files for your weekly project milestones. Each folder contains the starter scripts and a data/ folder with the data those scripts read. The step-by-step instructions for each milestone are a tutorial in the course site — open the "Milestone N" tutorial there and follow along, editing and running these files in your IDE.

Folder	Files	Milestone
milestones/shiny_01/	exercise1-app.R, exercise2-app.R, exercise3-app.R, data/	Week 1 — Welcome to Shiny: arranging layouts with layout_columns(), tabbed UIs with navset_card_tab(), and page_navbar()
milestones/shiny_02/	exercise1-app.R, exercise2-app.R, exercise3-app.R, data/	Week 2 — Reactivity and modern UIs: downloads, dateRangeInput(), and file uploads with fileInput()
milestones/shiny_03/	app.R, data/	Week 3 — Theming and publishing: bs_theme() / bs_themer() / thematic_shiny(), then publishing to Posit Connect

The Week 4 capstone project is set up separately when you reach it — see the course site for details.

How to use the milestone files

Open the "Milestone N" instructions tutorial in the course site to read what to do, then work through the exercises in the accompanying .R scripts here. Run an app the same way as the tutorial files — the Run App button in RStudio, the Run Shiny App play button in Positron, or from the Console with a path qualified to the milestone folder, e.g.

shiny::runApp("milestones/shiny_01/exercise1-app.R")

Each app reads its data from a relative data/ path, so it will find data/weather.csv as long as you launch it with one of those three methods.

One milestone at a time

You have access to all of the milestone files, but we encourage you to only focus on the milestone for the current week of your course. Milestone folders are numbered sequentially by week (shiny_01, shiny_02, shiny_03).