Syria Refugee Dashboard - A Shiny App

Re-engineered version of the Syria Regional Refugee Response Portal originally provided by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) based on R, Shiny, and Leaflet.

The version of the app residing in the master branch was deployed to ShinyApps.io and can be accessed here.

You may also want to visit the project-specific web page (gh-pages branch) here.

Installation

Installation on local machine

If you want to run the app locally on your machine, make sure to install at least R version 3.1.1 and the following libraries:

• devtools
• leaflet
• shiny
• yaml
• jsonlite
• curl
• plyr
• dplyr
• tidyr
• ggplot2
• RColorBrewer
• markdown

It is important to install leaflet and shiny via devtools in order to use minor versions:

devtools::install_github("jcheng5/leaflet-shiny")
devtools::install_github('rstudio/[email protected]')

After installing the prerequisites, download or git clone the entire content of the repo and store it in a folder of your choice. Assuming that the new folder will be your R working directory, use the runApp command to launch the app.

library(shiny)
runApp('.')

If you do not want to download the entire repo content yourself, you can use the runGitHub command as an alternative.

library(shiny)
runGitHub('Syria-Refugee-Response-Shiny-App', 'alex23lemm')

Installation on Ubuntu server

If you would like to install the application on an Ubuntu server instance (e.g. a T2.micro Amazon EC2 instance) you can excute the bash script setup.sh that is part of this repo. The script will install the following:

• Create and enable swap file: necessary when running on a T2.mirco EC2 instance. You won't be able to install certain R packages (e.g. dplyr, tidyr) without the additional allocated memory from the swap file
• The latest R distribution for Ubuntu Trusty
• Git
• Shiny server
• The devtools package including the necessary Linux packages
• R GitHub packages necessary to run the Shiny app
• R CRAN packages necessary to run the Shiny app
• The Shiny app (via git clone)

After running the script the Syria Refugee Dashboard app will be available at http://[server IP address]:3838/Syria-Refugee-Response-Shiny-App