shiny::includeMarkdown() breaks shiny live

[rbcavanaugh]

I'm trying to include some additional markdown text in a basic shiny live website. However, adding a bit of text using shiny::includeMarkdown() results in a blank white page in both Safari and Chrome. Inspecting the HTML shows an empty page:

See minimal example here: https://github.com/rbcavanaugh/shinylive-issue, where shinylive-start.R holds these two lines to run the app.

shinylive::export(here::here(), here::here("site"))
httpuv::runStaticServer("site/")

The Old Faithful app works fine per the example code (comment out the includeMarkdown() on app.R line 21.

Thanks!

[georgestagg]

It looks like the shiny::includeMarkdown() function is re-exporting htmltools::includeMarkdown(), which itself is calling out to markdown::mark(). Since markdown is listed only as a "Suggests" dependency of htmltools, it is not being downloaded by webR as your app starts up.

Please can you try manually installing the markdown package near the start of your app.R source, and then re-exporting?

library(shiny)
webr::install("markdown")