How to Add Shiny to Rmarkdown

Written by Matt Dancho on February 24, 2021

This article is part of a R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks.

Here are the links to get set up. 👇

Powering Rmarkdown Reports with Shiny

In this weekly R-Tip, we’re making a “Customer Churn Report” that uses both Rmarkdown (R Report Generator) and Shiny (Interactive Web Framework) to SPICE UP our business reports.

Rmarkdown

A great tool for business reporting. We can quickly convert our analysis to a business report by combining data, text, code, and visualizations.

Shiny

An R web framework with a HUGE ECOSYSTEM of interactive widgets, themes, and customizable user interfaces called the “Shinyverse”. We use Shiny to make our R Markdown Report interactive.

PRO TIP: I’ve streamlined the “Shinyverse” ecosystem on Page 2 of my Ultimate R Cheatsheet.

As you follow along, you can use my Ultimate R Cheatsheet. It consolidates the most important R packages (ones I use every day) into 1 cheatsheet.

How Shiny in Rmarkdown Works
Combining Rmarkdown reports with Interactive Shiny Widgets

This is a shiny widget in an R-Markdown Report. Shiny uses a rendering engine (called shiny server) to power the widgets. This gives us advanced control over our analytics.

Adding Shiny to Rmarkdown
Make your reports buzz-worthy

Shiny can be added to Rmarkdown’s HTML report. We just simply need to add runtime: shiny to the Rmarkdown Header (YAML).

Get the Full GitHubCode

When we click “Run Document”, a shiny server will run the document instead of a static HTML page is generated. This has a BIG ADVANTAGE - We can use Shiny in our Report.

Using Shiny in Your Report
An interactive report that encourages engagement.

Using shiny requires a bit of reactive programming experience (I teach predictive shiny dashboards and expert shiny with AWS as part of my 5-Course R-Track Program).

Here’s a snapshot of the code that powers this section of the report. We can see it’s a decorated version of ggplot code that connects the slider widget to the reactive plot.