How-to: Publish Rhino app on Hugging Face

Hugging Face is a platform that allows publishing models, datasets, and web applications. Shiny applications (including Rhino) also can be hosted this way, with Hugging Face support for Docker containers as SDK. A sample Rhino application can be found here.

To publish your application, you will need to provide a Dockerfile that defines the container that will be used to host it. Such a Dockerfile can look like this:

FROM rocker/shiny-verse:4.3.0

# Workaround for renv cache
RUN mkdir /.cache
RUN chmod 777 /.cache

WORKDIR /code

# Install renv
RUN install2.r --error \
    renv

# Copy application code
COPY . .

# Install dependencies
RUN Rscript -e 'options(renv.config.cache.enabled = FALSE); renv::restore(prompt = FALSE)'

CMD ["R", "--quiet", "-e", "shiny::runApp(host='0.0.0.0', port=7860)"]

You might need to modify it with e.g. different R version, base Docker image, or some additional dependencies. Check Docker documentation and Hugging Face documentation for more details.