When the audiences of a Shiny app are R users, it makes sense to share the app as a Gist, GitHub repository, or a zip file. They can run the app themselves if they are R savvy enough.

The source code for the app can be shared with collaborators, clients, and users. Of course testing goes way beyond just opening up the app, read more about best practices for engineering Shiny apps in this excellent book written by ThinkR folks. First and foremost, that is how you can test the app if you are the developer. There are a couple of reasons why running Shiny apps locally is necessary. Why bother reviewing all this? Well, as you will see in subsequent posts, this is the foundation for all the other kinds of hosting options. In this post you'll see a few ways of how to organize your files to be served locally. You only need the shiny R package installed, and you can run the app in your browser.

But the simplest way to run a Shiny app is to run it locally. You might be eager to deploy your Shiny app to a remote server.

Rstudio shiny app