How do I make a golem app appear at a specific URL route - golem

Question

We let the golem package automatically create a Dockerfile for us and can run the docker image and see the app at the root directory: http://localhost:3838/?...
But we would like the app to appear in a subdirectory like http://localhost:3838/myApp/v1/?... so that we can set up the necessary proxying for Apache and have this and other apps all available from a single server.
We can manually edit the Dockerfile to copy a shiny-server.conf file with the following information:
# Define a server that listens on port 3838
server {
listen 3838;
# Define a location at the base URL
location /myApp/v1/ {
# Host the directory of Shiny Apps stored in this directory
site_dir /srv/shiny-server;
# Log all Shiny output to files in this directory
log_dir /var/log/shiny-server;
}
}
The above solution feels like a hack and we are hoping there is functionality inside of golem that will allow us to set the subdirectory at which the app will appear.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no way to include an nginx configuration inside the Dockerfile programmatically: {golem} tries to help with the creation of the file, but some things still need to be done manually.
Also, note that {golem} doesn't create a Dockerfile with a shiny server in it, it creates a standalone docker image that launches the app, so there is no shiny server running, just an R process. {shiny} being what it is, there is no way to natively run it on a given path, it's always at the root, on a port.
That being said, what you can do is either edit the dockerfile so that it also bundle nginx (or any other load balancer), so that you can serve the app on a path, or serve your application on another port, using the port argument of add_dockerfile(): that might be easier to configure it with you Apache proxy.
Colin