Running open source shiny server on Debian

Chris Evans via R-help <[email protected]> Mon, 20 Jul 2026 17:07:11 +0100
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.r.general
Organization PSYCTC.org
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Apologies that this is at the edge/corner of R-help but I think at least 
some of the key issues are R ones.

I am a retired clinician continuing to do pro bono research but have 
zero research income.  However, I have run a little public service shiny 
server (https://shiny.psyctc.org) since early 2024 and want to continue 
with it and expand it.   (See 
https://www.psyctc.org/Analysing_shiny_usage.html for too much 
information about its use if that interests you!)

Recently my excellent ISP wanted to upgrade their various servers, 
including that one.  They are pretty much FLOSS only and happy that I 
use R but they are not R or shiny experts though, in my view, superb for 
general ISP Email and web server support on Debian.

They said that they were finding it hard to be sure of running the open 
source shiny server on Debian and I can find no recent information on 
this and see that Posit say that their OS shiny server is only 
installable on:
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and higher
    Ubuntu 22.04 and higher (LTS releases only)
    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7
(from https://docs.posit.co/shiny-server/)

They did do the upgrade of the server to bookworm and the shiny server 
is now on R 4.2.2.  The apps are all runnning OK (and they are mostly 
very simple) but this is clearly not good to be using a version of R 
that is four years old.

So could anyone point me to any information about installing the OS 
shiny server on Debian bookworm or trixie and using a recent R.

I am asking here before stepping into the time consuming process of 
installing a VM manager on my own Ubuntu machine, and then installing 
bookworm or trixie as VMs and trying to explore this myself.  I know 
that would be taking me to the limits of my competences (I am a 
psychotherapist and fairly competent data analyst not a server manager 
or programmer!) and using up hours of work time!!

TIA and thanks for umpteen (>=17) years of learning from r-help,

Chris
---
Chris Evans
Visiting Professor, UDLA, Quito, Ecuador
Work web site: https://www.psyctc.org/psyctc/
CORE site: http://www.coresystemtrust.org.uk/
Personal site: https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/