Can I Still Make a Submission if I Cannot Include Fully Reproducible Code?
We've received a number of questions related to submitting shiny apps that need to hide some information. This is usually due to the need to hide authentication and data base connection details, or to protect private data.
From @Mine; We welcome your submission for the Shiny Contest, even if you need to hide some data or code. However;
- The deployed shiny app must be fully assessable to the public.
- A repo must still be submitted. However, the repo – perhaps an altered version of the one running the submitted shiny app – may hide data, authentication or connection details, or other material that you are not able to share. If you do this, please fully document what is obfuscated in the app. Do this either in code comments or on the
README. - Note that one of the benefits of contest participation is the chance to be included in the Shiny Gallery. However, apps on the Shiny Gallery must match their publicly available repo, and so repos that do not contain fully reproducible app code are unlikely to be invited to join the gallery.
Background motivating this. A big motivation for the Shiny Contest is to encourage people to share their expertise in ways others can easily learn from. We feel an important part of this is for submissions to include code others can clone and run on their own. Hiding code obviously adds substantial frictions in getting an app up and running, or will completely prevent it. And so we'd like to discourage that as much as possible.
However, many great apps may have data or authentication that just can't be shared publicly. (For example, an app may require a connection to a public API which requires one's own authentication, though anyone should have access to the API, it is unreasonable to share your private token or other authentication details.) And so we will create some scope for these kinds of submissions.