Terminal commands/applications with shinyapps.io

shiny
1

I'm trying to host a Shiny app that works locally but doesn't once it's hosted via shinyapps.io. I suspect that the problem is with various dependencies. It uses reticulate to source a bunch of Python functions, and one of those functions calls exiftool from the terminal via the subprocess module. But exiftool doesn't come pre-installed (locally, I just did a sudo apt-get install exiftool). Is there any way to install it on the shinyapps.io instance as well?

2

Correct, exiftool is not installed by default.

The normal mechanism by which additional system packages are installed is based on the installation of an R package that requires it. In this case, there is exifr. Once shinyapps-package-dependencies had an install script for exifr, you could then add library(exifr) to your code, and the Python call out would have it available.

2 Likes
3

Thanks. Adding a library(exifr) seems to have installed exiftool, but for some reason I can't seem to call it via Python/reticulate. For example, if I have this in my script:

library(reticulate)
library(exifr)

subprocess <- import('subprocess')
exiftool_path <- getOption('exifr.exiftoolcommand')
subprocess$check_output(paste(exiftool_path, 'FLIR_350.jpeg'))

Then I get the following message:

Using ExifTool version 10.61
Error in value[[3L]](cond) : OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory

Detailed traceback: 
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 567, in check_output
    process = Popen(stdout=PIPE, *popenargs, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 711, in __init__
    errread, errwrite)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1343, in _execute_child
    raise child_exception
Calls: local ... tryCatch -> tryCatchList -> tryCatchOne -> <Anonymous>
Execution halted

No such errors when running locally.

Is there a way to access the terminal in a shinyapps.io instance?

EDIT: I decided to instead just dump exiftool files in the app folder, and after a chmod it works. I'm guessing that if I do a chmod on whatever getOption('exifr.exiftoolcommand') returns, I can use that instead of dumping exiftool files into the app directory.

Thanks for your help.

1 Like
4

There is no terminal available for shinyapps.io.
You can issue calls from R to inspect the system though.

That said, you might check the value of exiftool_path, for me, locally, it is:

> library(exifr)
Using ExifTool version 10.61
> getOption('exifr.exiftoolcommand')
[1] "'perl' '/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.5/Resources/library/exifr/exiftool/exiftool.pl'"

and so I am not surprised that passing it as such isn't quite working.

1 Like