Howdy,
Happy to report that production[1] and development[2] sets of Discovery Dashboards are up and running again, this time managed by Puppet. (There was a bug with web proxies and DNS settings that delayed this announcement.) Theoretically they should be snappier to use now because there is no longer an extra virtualization (Vagrant) layer and they are running directly on Labs instances.
R is a software and programming language mainly used for statistical inference, machine learning, and data wrangling & visualization. RStudio's Shiny[3] is a framework for developing web applications in R, and it's what Discovery's dashboards are written in.
The Reading::Discovery::Analysis team (with guidance and help from Guillaume Lederrey) is proud to announce a new module available in Ops' Puppet repo: shiny_server[4], which installs & configures RStudio's Shiny Server[5] for serving R/Shiny applications. The module also provides resources for installing R packages from CRAN, GitHub, and other remote git repositories like Gerrit. For a practical example, refer to Discovery Dashboards base[6] and production[7] profiles.
Cheers, Mikhail on behalf of Discovery Analysts
[1] https://discovery.wmflabs.org [2] https://discovery-beta.wmflabs.org/ [3] https://shiny.rstudio.com/ [4] https://github.com/wikimedia/puppet/tree/production/modules/shiny_server [5] https://www.rstudio.com/products/shiny/shiny-server/ [6] https://github.com/wikimedia/puppet/blob/production/modules/profile/manifest... [7] https://github.com/wikimedia/puppet/blob/production/modules/profile/manifest...