ShinyProxy Authentication demo

This repository explains how to retrieve the username and group of the current user when deploying a Shiny app using ShinyProxy. The corresponding app can be run in ShinyProxy and shows the available values.

Using environment variables

When ShinyProxy creates a container, it passes the username and groups to the container using environment variables. This method is supported in all versions of ShinyProxy. However, it does not work when using container pre-initialization and sharing introduced in ShinyProxy 3.1.0.

Example code:

Sys.getenv("SHINYPROXY_USERNAME")
Sys.getenv("SHINYPROXY_USERGROUPS")

See app.r for a complete example.

Using HTTP headers

Starting with version 3.1.0, ShinyProxy adds the username (and groups) as HTTP headers to every request sent to an app. This method is always supported, even when using container pre-initialization and sharing.

session$request$HTTP_X_SP_USERID
session$request$HTTP_X_SP_USERGROUPS

See app.r for a complete example.

Building the Docker image

To pull the image made in this repository from Docker Hub, use

sudo docker pull openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth

The relevant Docker Hub repository can be found at https://hub.docker.com/r/openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth.

To build the image from the Dockerfile, navigate into the root directory of this repository and run

sudo docker build -t openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth .

Running the image for testing purposes outside ShinyProxy can be done using e.g.

sudo docker run -it -p 3838:3838 openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth

ShinyProxy Configuration

Create a ShinyProxy configuration file (see application.yml for a complete file), containing:

proxy:
  specs:
    - id: shiny-auth
      container-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth

UTF-8 characters

The HTTP standard specifies that only printable ASCII characters are allowed in HTTP headers. Therefore, if a username contains any other character, the app may fail to start. This can be solved by encoding the values using base64:

proxy:
  specs:
    - id: shiny-auth
      container-image: openanalytics/shinyproxy-shiny-demo-auth
      add-default-http-headers: false
      http_headers:
        X-SP-UserId: "#{T(java.util.Base64).getEncoder().encodeToString(proxy.getRuntimeValue('SHINYPROXY_USERNAME').getBytes())}"
        X-SP-UserGroups: "#{proxy.getRuntimeValue('SHINYPROXY_USERGROUPS')}"

Next, in R this values must be decoded using the base64enc library:

rawToChar(base64enc::base64decode(session$request$HTTP_X_SP_USERID))

The next version of ShinyProxy will ignore these headers and log a warning, see openanalytics/shinyproxy#533.

References

• ShinyProxy.io
• All demos

(c) Copyright Open Analytics NV, 2024.