How to make your home Shiny or Rstudio Server accessible from the public internet

Prerequisites

1. I’m writing this article under the assumption that you already have Shiny and/or RStudio server properly installed on a computer at home (if you haven’t, you can check out the other articles in my blog for inspiration).

2. You need to have a public IP assigned to your router (it doesn’t matter if it changes dynamically), not everybody has one since some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use a NAT3 configuration, which basically means that you share a public IP with a group of their clients and there will be no means to map an HTTP request to your home server, however, it is possible that you can get your NAT configuration changed if you call your ISP and request for a public IP so you might want to give it a try.

3. You need to know the user and password to access your router’s configuration interface, some ISPs let it as default and you only need to google the default password for your router’s model, but in most cases, they change it so you would need to give them a call and ask for your credentials.

Open the Required Ports in the Server

Specific ports for Shiny and/or RStudio server need to be accessible in your server to be able to connect to those services. Most Linux distributions come with all ports accessible by default but it is a common (and good) practice to install a firewall to restrict access to your server, if this is your case, you need to make sure that you have the required ports open.

For Shiny server the default port is 3838 and for RStudio server it is 8787 (this can be customized). If you have configured a reverse proxy with Nginx or Apache you can obviate those ports and only open port 80 for HTTP or port 443 for HTTPS. For example, the command to allow incoming traffic on port 80 using the ufw firewall in Ubuntu-based systems would be like this:

sudo ufw allow 80/tcp

And using firewalld in RHEL-based systems would be:

sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-port=80/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload

You could have other rules that could prevent traffic from going into your server from remote locations so you might want to inspect your firewall rules and look for anything restricting incoming traffic.

Configure Port Forwarding in your Router

Open a web browser on a device that is connected to your local network and type your router’s local IP, usually, it is something like 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. All routers have a web server running on port 80 by default so by typing their IP it would open a web page with the configuration interface.

In my particular case, I’m steel using a cheap Sagemcom HFC modem my ISP gave me (because I’m always going to set up my custom pfSense router very soon), so if I open a Chrome browser and type 192.168.0.1 this is what I get.

In your case, the user interface would look different and options might have slightly different names but they are basically the same.

Enter your credentials to get access to the configuration interface, which in my case looks like this.

Then, search among all the available tabs to find the “port forwarding” section, it is not going to be in the same place for you but most modern routers have this section.

Once in there add forwarding rules for Shiny and/or Rstudio server (You have to replace “your_sever_ip” with your actual server’s local IP) and apply changes.

If you are using a reverse proxy, you only need to make sure you have one of these.

Also, make sure you don’t have a “Block WAN traffic” option enabled in your router, this will block all incoming traffic whatsoever.

After doing all these you should be able to access your shiny apps by typing your.public.ip:3838/your_app_name and/or your Rstudio Server by typing your.public.ip:8787 in any browser.

Optional Extra Steps

sudo apt install nginx

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
      default upgrade;
      ''      close;
    }

    rewrite ^/shiny$ $scheme://$http_host/shiny/ permanent;
    # This part is for Shiny server
    location /shiny/ {
        rewrite ^/shiny/(.*)$ /$1 break;
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3838;
        proxy_redirect / $scheme://$http_host/shiny/;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
        proxy_read_timeout 20d;
        proxy_buffering off;
    }
    # This part is for RStudio server
    location /rstudio {
       # Needed only for prefix of /rstudio
       rewrite ^/rstudio/(.*)$ /$1 break;

       # Use http here when ssl-enabled=0 is set in rserver.conf
       proxy_pass http://localhost:8787;
       proxy_http_version 1.1;

       proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
       proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;

       # Optionally, use an explicit hostname and omit the port if using 80/443
       proxy_set_header Host $host:$server_port;

       # Not needed if there's no prefix or www-root-path is set in rserver.conf
       proxy_set_header X-RStudio-Root-Path /rstudio;

       proxy_read_timeout 20d;
    }

sudo service nginx restart