shinyblocks

shinyblocks is an experimental R package for building modern Shiny dashboards with composable, accessible UI blocks inspired by shadcn/ui. It is designed for R/Shiny authors who want polished dashboard layouts, forms, overlays, navigation, theming, and runtime interactions without adding a Node, Tailwind, Vite, or React build step to their app.

The package is not on CRAN yet, and the public API may change before the first stable release.

Documentation and component gallery

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub:

install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("nvelden/shinyblocks")

Quick Example

library(shiny)
library(shinyblocks)

ui <- block_page(
  title = "Operations",
  sidebar = block_sidebar(
    title = "shinyblocks",
    block_nav_item("Overview", icon = "layout-dashboard", selected = TRUE),
    block_nav_item("Reports", icon = "file-text")
  ),
  header = block_header(
    "Operations dashboard",
    block_dark_mode_toggle()
  ),
  block_card(
    title = "Revenue",
    description = "+8% from last week",
    value = "$42,100"
  ),
  block_field(
    block_field_label("Region", `for` = "region"),
    block_select(
      "region",
      choices = c("Americas", "EMEA", "APAC"),
      selected = "Americas"
    )
  )
)

server <- function(input, output, session) {}

shinyApp(ui, server)

Component Gallery

Run the local showcase app from an installed package checkout:

shinyblocks::run_showcase()

The hosted documentation and gallery are available at https://nvelden.github.io/shinyblocks/.

Use With Shinylive

shinyblocks can be used in Shinylive/webR apps before the package is available through CRAN or the default webR package repositories. Pre-built WebAssembly binaries are published on r-universe and rebuilt automatically from main on every push. Install at the top of your Shinylive app.R:

if (!"shinyblocks" %in% rownames(installed.packages())) {
  install.packages(
    "shinyblocks",
    repos = c("https://nvelden.r-universe.dev", "https://repo.r-wasm.org")
  )
}

library(shiny)
library(shinyblocks)

The first Shinylive load can take a little longer while webR downloads and caches the package binaries.