Although the app is free to run on the RShiny server, we recommend that regular users download it and run it locally on their machine. This is to avoid the risk of becoming disconnected from the server before the results have been saved.
To run the app locally, you need to download R and RStudio (both are free to download and use). If you already have R and RStudio installed, make sure you are running the latest version of R (a quick way to update R from within RStudio is to type the following)
install.packages("installr"); library(installr) # install+load installr
updateR() # updating R.
To download R, click on the link that applies to your machine.
To download RStudio, click on the link that applies to your machine.
To run the app:
- Open RStudio and select your working directory (in RStudio, this can be done by pressing Ctrl+Shift+H and then you can browse as normal to select your preferred directory).
- Download the app.R file by clicking on this link and save it in your working directory.
- Download the packages.R file by clicking on this link and save it in your working directory.
- Download the www.zip file by clicking on this link and save it in your working directory. This file includes figures with the hierarchical representation of the model that indicate which parameters are modelled as a function of covariates (so are not essential and the app will run without them, but they do look nice!). Extract all files in the same directory but make sure that the resulting www folder includes the figures, and not another folder called www, which includes all the figures (this is simply done either by deleting the www in the suggested name of the extracted files before extracting or, after extracting by just moving all the figures within the top www folder).
- Open the file packages.R in RStudio (click File-Open file and then find the packages.R file).
- Click on the Source button (top right corner of the packages.R script). This will install all R packages that are required to run the app locally and it may take a few minutes). If you are asked whether to create a personal library, then click yes.
- Open the file app.r in RStudio (click File-Open file and then find the app.R file) and click on “Run App” (top right corner of the app.R script). The app will automatically open in your default web browser (if that doesn’t happen, then click on the little arrow to the right of the Run App button and select Run External).