Security in an R Shiny Application

Question

I want to publish an R Shiny web application (http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/) on the web, but I want to password protect it so that only people with credentials can view what I h

Answer 1

A bit more late, but I've found another option using ngnix as a proxy:

This guide has been finished by following partially this guideline: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/213733868-Running-Shiny-Server-with-a-Proxy

On an Ubuntu 14.04:

1. Install nginx
2. Change file config /etc/nginx/nginx.conf to:

This:

events {
        worker_connections 768;
        multi_accept on;
}

http {

  map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
      default upgrade;
      ''      close;
    }

  server {
    listen XX;



    location / {
      proxy_pass http://localhost:YY;
      proxy_redirect http://localhost:YY/ $scheme://$host/;
      proxy_http_version 1.1;
      proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
      proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
      proxy_read_timeout 20d;

      auth_basic "Restricted Content";
      auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;
    }
  }
}

XX: Port that the nginx will listen to

YY: Port that the shiny server uses

3. Using this tutorial, I added password authentication to the nginx server: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-password-authentication-with-nginx-on-ubuntu-14-04

4. Set up the shiny process or the shiny server to only listen to localhost (127.0.0.1)