shinylive in Quarto document with reactive data source

[petzi53]

I want to load a data file for a shinylive-r without user input. My demo code works fine in a Shiny app, but not in shinylive-r.

Here is my Shiny app code:

library(shiny)

ui <- fluidPage(
    tableOutput("data"),
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {

    fileData <- reactiveFileReader(
        intervalMillis = 1000, NULL,
        filePath = 'https://github.com/petzi53/learning-shiny/raw/refs/heads/master/data/products.tsv',
        readFunc = vroom::vroom, show_col_types = FALSE
       )

    output$data <- renderTable({
        head(fileData())
    })
}

shinyApp(ui, server)
#> 
#> Listening on http://127.0.0.1:6881

^{Created on 2025-07-04 with reprex v2.1.1}

I used a file URL because I believe that it is not possible to reference local files with shinylive.

And here is my shinylive-r code chunk:

---
title: "Test shinylive reactiveFileReader "
format: html
filters: 
    - shinylive
---


```{shinylive-r}
#| standalone: true
#| viewerHeight: 550
#| components: [editor, viewer]


## file apps.R
{{< include test-shinylive-reactive-file/app.R >}}

```

The result is a blank screen with the error message:

Error: cannot open the connection to 'https://github.com/petzi53/learning-shiny/raw/refs/heads/master/data/products.tsv'. See the Javascript console for further information

Any idea what is wrong? Help is very much appreciated.

[Simon_Smart]

Firstly, this isn't specific to Quarto as it doesn't run in the shinylive editor either. I suspect it's related to how {vroom} opens URLs - it has a dependency on {curl} which isn't available in webR and it might well rely on that to download files via a URL. I can open a file fine using the same method but read.table() instead of vroom::vroom() (which I think uses download.file() instead of {curl}), so if you can convert your data to a file format that read.table() can handle, it should work. I'm a bit confused why you need reactiveFileReader() in the first place though - it's normally used when a file is being frequently updated.

[petzi53]

Your answer was beneficial and helped me to find the problem. However, it is not correct, as shinylive is working with both {vroom} and {readr}.

The problem was my URL: I used as file path 'https://github.com/petzi53/…' instead of the correct URL 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/petzi53/…'.

And now comes the peculiar thing: The Shiny app worked using {vroom} with my 'github.com' URL, but shinylive did not. There is a second anomaly: I emphasized my because it worked with my (wrong) URL but not with yours.

But whatever the reason for the second oddity, the main problem was my wrong URL.
I apologize for my mistake and thank you for your patience.

As the problem is solved, I will close this post.

PS.: You are right to be confused with my using of reactiveFileReader(). It was a desperate move after trying different options for several hours. I thought that the problem had to do with reactivity.