BikeSpace Dashboard

Dashboard application to visualize user-submited bike parking issues in the City of Toronto from app.bikespace.ca. Built using R Studio's Shiny platform, Leaflet, Highcharts, and Mapbox.

Structure

The application is located in bikespace-dashboard directory and consists of the global.R, ui.R, server.R, report.Rmd files and the www/ directory, which contains the BikeSpace logo and the custom.css file

Installation

To run the application locally, download R and R Studio, an IDE for the R programming language (not necessary but highly reccomended).

Once downloaded, the following code will install the necessary packages to run the application:

# For easy package install in local environment:
# Check to see if packages are installed. Install them if they are not, then load them into the R session.
check.packages <- function(pkg){
   new.pkg <- pkg[!(pkg %in% installed.packages()[, "Package"])]
   if (length(new.pkg))
     install.packages(new.pkg, dependencies = TRUE)
   sapply(pkg, require, character.only = TRUE)
 }

packages <- c("shiny", "shinydashboard", "RCurl", "jsonlite", "igraph","highcharter",
               "rvest", "purrr", "tidyr", "dplyr", "stringr", "leaflet", "htmltools",
               "RColorBrewer", "rmarkdown", "webshot", "shinyBS", "shinyjs", "shinyWidgets",
               "ggplot2", "Hmisc")
 
check.packages(packages)

PDF export

The PDF export functionality of the application requires a LaTeX distribution and PhantomJS to be installed.

MikTeX is our reccommended LaTeX distribution, while you can install PhantomJS through R by running webshot::install_phantomjs()

Launch

Launch the application by running the runApp() command within the working directory where the application files are located.

Docker workflow

The entire shiny app has be containerized here, we use the containerized version to ship and deploy through Amazon ECS.

To build a new docker image and tag:

docker build -t bikespace/shiny-dashboard:latest .

The image is being hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Registry, contact the administrator for access to the container registry to pull/push the latest docker images

To push a docker image to the Amazon ECR, tag the latest built docker image with the Amazon ECR registry.

docker tag [IMAGE_ID] [aws_account_id].dkr.ecr.[region].amazonaws.com/[app_name]

To push to ECR, get aws ecr login:

aws ecr get-login --no-include-email

This will return a docker login command with the authorization token to be able to push to ECR. Once successfully logged in you can push the image you tagged in the previous step.

docker push [aws_account_id].dkr.ecs.[region].amazonaws.com/[app_name]

Contact

For more information about BikeSpace, check out our website