shinypal

shinypal provides the building blocks for modular, interactive Shiny applications that turn point-and-click pipelines into reproducible R and R Markdown code. Using {shinymeta}, shinypal assembles code modules into a draggable workflow, shows the equivalent code as the user builds it, and lets them export the whole pipeline as a runnable script or rendered report.

Installation

shinypal is not yet on CRAN. Install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
# pak::pak("willgearty/shinypal")
install.packages("shinypal", repos = c('https://willgearty.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

How it works

A shinypal app has two halves:

• A small host app that calls shinypal_ui() in its UI and shinypal_setup() at the top of its server function, pointing both at a directory of modules.
• One module per group of analysis steps. A module is a folder with at least three files: ui-main.R (the panel advertising the steps), ui-aux.R (the interactive workflow components related to those steps), and server.R (which builds the steps' {shinymeta} reactives and registers them via shinypal).

As steps are added, shinypal keeps a reactive code chain in workflow order, renders each step's generated code, and assembles a downloadable script or report. See vignette("shinypal") for a walkthrough of building your own app.

Funding and acknowledgments

Development of shinypal has been supported by:

• A Norman Newell Early Career Grant from the Paleontological Society.
• Grants (#G2023-20946, #G-2025-79206) from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation through the Syracuse University Open Source Program Office (SU-OSPO).

License

GPL (>= 3) © William Gearty