Shiny Tail

Have you ever wanted to follow a log file in real-time within a Shiny app? If you are familiar with linux, you might be looking for tail -f my.log.

The shinytail package should fill this desire. It provides helpers to easily:

• use processx to execute tail -f my.log on the server (tailFile)
• stream the results into Shiny using readStream
• display the results in a "stream-friendly" UI widget called shinyTail

We also provide a helper for writing such streams to a file during testing (writeStream).

Get Started

Install the latest development version:

devtools::install_github("colearendt/shinytail")

Examples

There is a simple example app in this repository.

Another use case is to use RStudio Server Pro with R console auditing along with shinytail for a real-time, live-coding Shiny app! This approach can be useful for training and workshops.

Helpful Tips

• If you are trying to use R console auditing, be sure to restart the RStudio Server Pro service and the R session after the configuration option audit-r-console=input is set. Otherwise, no auditing will happen.
• Something strange happens when writing a stream in a background process of a Shiny application. We are not sure yet if this is a callr and shiny compatibility issue or where the problem is occurring.