Contribute to Shiny

Shiny would not be possible without the contributions of the R community. No matter your current skills, it’s possible to contribute to Shiny.

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Answer questions

The easiest way to help out is to answer questions. You won’t know the answer to everything, but that’s ok! Even just the acknowledgement that someone cares enough to try can be tremendously encouraging.

Many people asking for help, don’t know about reprexes. A little education, and some help crafting a reprex can go a long way. You might not answer the question, but you’ll help someone answer it more easily.

If you’re interested in answering questions, good places to start are the Posit Community site, Stack Overflow, and Twitter. Just remember that while you might have seen the problem a hundred times before, it’s new to the person asking it. Be patient, polite, and empathic.

File issues

If you’ve found a bug, first create a minimal reprex. Spend some time trying to make it as minimal as possible: the more time you spend doing this, the easier it will be for the Shiny team to fix it. Then file it on the GitHub repo.

Contribute documentation or code

If you’re a bit more experienced with Shiny and are looking to improve your open source development skills, the next step up is to contribute a pull request to the shiny package. The most important thing to know is that Shiny uses roxygen2: this means that documentation is found in the R code close to the source of each function.

Before you do a pull request, you should always file an issue and make sure someone from the Shiny team agrees that it’s a problem, and is happy with your basic proposal for fixing it. We don’t want you to spend a bunch of time on something that we don’t think is a good idea.

Before contributing to the package in any way, please review the contributing guidelines.