u/xTrew

Hello everyone,

I’m looking for some advice/validation regarding the web infrastructure for our research lab. We are building two things using R-based frameworks:

1. A static lab website built with Quarto.
2. Several dynamic web apps built with Shiny.

Like many academic labs, we are on a tight budget. Paid solutions like Posit Cloud/shinyapps.io ($20+/month) are too expensive for our use, and we only want to pay for a custom domain (~$10/year).

Here is the architecture we are planning:

• Host the Quarto static site on GitHub Pages (free) and link it to our root domain (e.g., lab.com).
• We have a dedicated PC in the university running open-source Shiny Server. The apps are currently running fine, but they are only accessible via the university intranet.
• University IT is usually unresponsive and won't open ports or configure firewalls for us.
• We plan to use Cloudflare Tunnels on the local PC. This would expose the Shiny Server to the internet securely without opening inbound ports or setting up a reverse proxy (Nginx) ourselves. We would route this to a subdomain (e.g., tools.lab.com/app1).

1. Is this a sound approach, or am I overcomplicating things?
2. Is the subdomain approach (tools.lab.com) the best way to integrate this, or is there a simple way to have everything under the root domain (lab.com/tools) without causing routing conflicts with GitHub Pages?
3. Has anyone deployed a similar stack in an academic/strict IT environment? Any caveats regarding Cloudflare Tunnels and university firewalls I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance for your insights!