Script to guarantee app deploy using rsconnect:deployApp - r

Question

I am able to deploy my shiny app with:
rsconnect::deployApp(appName = 'Test', launch.browser = FALSE, forceUpdate = T)
However, it does not always successfully deploy the app. I plan to have this run in a script as a Scheduled Task, and want to make sure the deployApp finishes successfully (if the process doesn't succeed, try again).
I imagine you could place this in a while loop, but I am not sure how to include script that would recognize if the function executed successfully or failed. Anyone have ideas?
Error Messages:
Preparing to deploy application...DONE
Error: $ operator is invalid for atomic vectors

Answer 1

As I say in the comment above, I really don't think this is a good idea. To do it safely and robustly will take a lot of work. And the error message you quote above looks pretty "uncontrolled" to me, so I suspect it's got more to do with a problem in your app than a temporary issue with the publishing process. In which case, you will be in an infinitely loop unless you take steps to prevent it. Have you investigated what your publish record and remote deployment log tell you?
That said, this would be my approach if I had to do it.
Create a flag, deploymentFlag, say, in the global environment and set it to FALSE.
Write a function, onDeploymentFailure() say, which sets deploymentFlag to FALSE.
Wrap you call to deployApp in a while loop like this
while(!deploymentFlag) {
deploymentFlag <- TRUE
rsconnect::deployApp(
...,
on.failure=onDeploymentFailure,
logLevel="verbose",
recordDir=<some dir>
)
if (!deploymentFlag) {
...interrogate the publish record to try to determine what went wrong,
and correct it if possible...
}
}
For safety, especially whilst developing and testing, I'd make sure that each attempt wrote a different publish log and I'd limit the maximum number of attempts to a very small number: 1 to start with, then 2 or 3 after I'd solved the initial problems, and so on.