Problem Definition
I have a shiny app that relies on a number of packages mainly from CRAN. Some of the packages have been installed from publicly available bitbucket repos eg:
devtools::install_bitbucket("richierocks/assertive.properties")
devtools::install_bitbucket("richierocks/assertive.types")
...there are others too.
The app works great locally but when I go to deploy the app on shinyapps.io, I get the following error:
Error: Unhandled Exception: child_task=1392178012 child_task_status=failed: Error parsing manifest: Unknown repository for package source: bitbucket
Execution halted
Seemingly shinyapps.io can't install a publicly available bitbucket package as it can't see the source. Is there a way to add this 'package source' so that it can be seen by shinyapps.io and then the packages can be installed when the app is being deployed?
Context
In thinking about solutions, it might be helpful to know context of this problem. My app uses the rdrop2 package which provides access to the dropbox API and its quite central to the apps functionality. This is no longer being maintained it seems and so it is no longer on CRAN. So now I need to install rdrop2 from github (devtools::install_github("karthik/rdrop2")), but this also requires that a bunch of assertive dependencies also be installed manually like this. That's the bigger picture of my problem in case it helps inspire anyone to think of a workaround.