A little blog post about where to look if you want to get started with {golem}, and an invitation to code with us in October.
go-what?
Table of Contents
If you’ve never heard about it before, {golem} is a tool for building production-grade Shiny applications. With {golem}, Shiny developers have a toolkit for making a stable, easy-to-maintain, and robust for production web applications with R.
{golem} has been developed to abstract away the most common engineering tasks (for example, module creation, addition of external CSS or JavaScript file, …), so you can focus on what matters: building the application. And once your application is ready to be deployed, {golem} guides you through testing, and brings you tools for deploying to common platforms.
Two months on the CRAN
The {golem} package has been on CRAN for almost two months now, and got installed during that time more than 1400 times.
library(cranlogs)
golem <- cran_downloads("golem", from = "2019-08-05", to = Sys.Date() - 1)
sum(golem$count)
[1] 1409
Which is, in graph:
ggplot(golem, aes(date, count)) +
geom_col() +
labs(
title = sprintf(
"{golem} downloads from 2019-08-05 to %s",
Sys.Date() - 1
),
caption = "data from {cranlogs}"
) +
theme_minimal()
{golem}, where should I start?
Finding the docs
If you want to get started with {golem}, the best place to start is the doc at thinkr-open.github.io/golem. There, you’ll find a series of vignettes that will guide you through the whole process of building an app with {golem}. You can also refer to the CheatSheet.
You can also go through our talks about golem:
- useR! 2019 : A Framework for Building Robust & Production Ready Shiny Apps
- ThinkR x Rstudio Roadshow,Paris : Production-grade Shiny Apps with {golem}
If you’re more of a video person, you can find information about {golem} on:
- Shiny Developer Series Episode 2: {golem} and Effective Shiny Development Methods
- Shiny Developer Series, Hands-on demonstration of {golem}!
- useR! 2019 : A Framework for Building Robust & Production Ready Shiny Apps
We’re also currently writing a book about Building production-grade Shiny apps, that will be published in the R Series, and that will contain large sections about golem. The book is still being written, but feel free to watch the repo to get updated when new things happen.
{golem} examples
Here are some example apps built with {golem}:
- ColinFay/golemexample provides a small app that shows some features of an app built with
{golem} - ColinFay/golemize has an example of an app from Shiny Examples which has been turned to a
{golem}
Join us for Hacktoberfest
We would love to have more people on board for this open source adventure, that’s why I’ve tagged a series of issues in {golem} with the “hacktoberfest” label.
If you’ve never heard of Hacktoberfest, it’s an online event during the month of October, organised by DEV and DigitalOcean, during which everyone is invited to submit Pull requests to an open source project. More on that on the official website.
You can find all the issues for Hacktoberfest on our repo (click on the link below). You’re also free to PR any other issue, or to PR another of our open source packages. I’ve also tagged {golem} issues by difficulty and estimated time spent so that you can go for a simple issue or for a more complicated one if you have the skill and/or time. Hope this will make you want to contribute!
