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R Youth Homelessness Analyzer (RYHA)

The goal of ryha is to provide a web-based application for in-depth, user-friendly provision & consumption of Youth Homelessness data across the State of Ohio.

Installation

This Shiny application is built using the {golem} framework, which means that this app is actually an R package.

You can install ryha with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("COHHIO/ryha")

Running the App

Before launching the app:

  • You must determine the environment that will be used to create the data model. This is accomplished by setting APP_BACKEND environmental variable. Valid options are:

    • prod, which connects to the database in production
    • dev, which connects to an internal database that is set up using dev containers. Check Development Environment article to learn how to set it up.
    • file, which reads a provided .rds data model object and does not require any database connection.

  • If you are connecting to a database (i.e. APP_BACKEND=prod or APP_BACKEND=dev) you must have the following additional configuration to be able to upload data to the app and write to the database:

    • Environment Variable (for uploading data to the app):

      • UPLOAD_PWD: sets the password required to upload data to the database.

    • Hash keys developed for encrypting the data during the writing process (stored at the root of the directory, needed for writing to the database)

  • If you are connecting to the database in production (i.e. APP_BACKEND=prod) you must have the following additional configurations set to interact with the database:

    • Environment Variables:

      • DB_NAME: database name. It specifies the name of the specific database within the PostgreSQL server to which you want to connect.
      • DB_HOST: host address of the PostgreSQL server. In our case, it will be a particular domain name (e.g. db.example.com).
      • DB_PORT: port number on which the PostgreSQL server is listening for connections.
      • DB_USER: username used to authenticate with the PostgreSQL server. The user must have the necessary permissions to connect to the specified database.
      • DB_PWD: password associated with the specified user account. It is used for authentication purposes to ensure that the connection is secure.

Environmental variables should be stored in a .Renviron file located at the root of the directory.

After installing the package, you can launch the app using the package’s run_app() function.

ryha::run_app()