Dear shiny teams,
We are shinyapps.io Basic Plan users and recently developed a web tool (named PTMoreR) based on shiny and deployed it on shinyapps.io server. This tool need to call some functions from the ncbi-blast software, which can be downloaded from https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast/executables/blast+/LATEST/. Thus, could you give me some suggestions about how to install this ncbi-blast software on the shinyapp.io server? Or could you help install this software in the server?
Thanks a lot and we look forward to hearing from you.
Bests,
Shisheng Wang and Yansheng Liu,
Yale University School of Medicine
I'm afraid shinyapps.io is only meant for Shiny apps, and won't let you install other programs. I can think of a few solutions, none of them trivial.
The easiest is if you can find a self-contained R package that can run BLAST; a quick look suggests it might not exist, both rBLAST and BLASTr seem to require installation of the NCBI BLAST+ library.
A second solution would be to use either the API or the "cloud" version of BLAST provided by NCBI, and have your Shiny app send queries to these (e.g. using httr). The API has limits on how many queries you can send, and I think ElasticBlast might have a cost.
Finally, you can always get a server at a general provider (e.g. GoDaddy, DigitalOcean etc), and install and configure both Shiny-server and NCBI BLAST+. That might take more effort if you're not familiar with Linux system administration.
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