R Shiny with user authentication over HTTPS

I want to use R Shiny to create dashboards to look at health record data from OpenMRS. This tutorial is not specific to OpenMRS. I'll explain how to get R Shiny working with user authentication via ShinyProxy and KeyCloak, all dockerized, all over HTTPS.

Notate Bene

We're going to use ShinyProxy with "simple" (insecure) auth available only on the LAN, and set up an instance in the cloud with KeyCloak authentication, with a KeyCloak server we'll also set up in the cloud.

I'm just going to document the fully secured setup -- the insecure setup is a subset of the work.

So far, I've only gotten KeyCloak to work with dockerized MariaDB. Getting it to work with un-dockerized MySQL is a to-do.

The Stack

• Shiny is an R library for producing webapps.

• ShinyProxy is an authorization and orchestration layer. It checks whether a user is authenticated, and if not, sends them to KeyCloak for authentication. It then presents an interface for launching the Shiny apps that the user is authorized to use.

• KeyCloak is a crazy powerful user/auth management application, which provides a management console for adding users, a login screen, and a million options.

• MariaDB will hold the user data, but could also be used for other things (e.g. by the Shiny apps).

• https-portal will act as a reverse proxy, securing everything over HTTPS. It runs nginx under the hood and uses letsencrypt for TLS certificates.

                     +----------------------------------------------------------+
                     |                                               _______    |
                     | Docker                 +----------+          /       \   |
                     |                auth    |          |         +         +  |
                     |              +-------> | KeyCloak +-------> | MariaDB |  |
                     |              |         |          |         +         +  |
                     |              |         +----------+          \_______/   |
                     |              |                                           |
+--------+           +--------------+                                           |
|        | https     |              |                                           |
| Client +---------> | https-portal |                                           |
|        |           |              |         +------------+         +-------+  |
+--------+           +--------------+         |            |         |       |  |
   |--|              |              +-------> | ShinyProxy +-------> | Shiny |  |
+--------+           |          authenticated |            |         |       |  |
+--------+           |            app data    +------------+         +-------+  |
                     |                                                          |
                     |                                                          |
                     +----------------------------------------------------------+

Server Setup

Spin up a server. I'm working on Debain Stretch. I like that it doesn't have the AppArmor weirdness mentioned below.

Docker Setup

Install Docker

Configure daemon to be available at port 2375. Three ways to try doing this, in order of least likely to screw things up:

1. Create a file /etc/docker/daemon.json with the following contents:

   {
       "hosts": [ "unix://", "tcp://127.0.0.1:2375" ]
   }
   

   and do a sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart docker.

2. Do sudo systemctl edit docker.service. Set the file contents to

   [Service]
   ExecStart=
   ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -D -H tcp://127.0.0.1:2375
   

   and do a sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl restart docker.

3. Refer to the ShinyProxy instructions.

Note that you don't want Docker to yell all-caps security warnings into your syslog, you'll need to enable TLS for the docker daemon. Having gone with method (1) (after method (2) caused docker to stop working one day), and creating my keys in /etc/docker/keys/, my dockerd config file looked like

{
    "hosts": [ "unix://", "tcp://127.0.0.1:2375" ],
    "tlsverify": true,
    "tlscert": "/etc/docker/keys/cert.pem",        
    "tlscacert": "/etc/docker/keys/ca.pem",        
    "tlskey": "/etc/docker/keys/key.pem"           
}

On Ubuntu 18.04, I had to disable AppArmor because otherwise Docker containers were unkillable. But this will make snaps fail to start. Good luck.

Add your user to the docker group: sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

Install Docker Compose

Create the network everything will run on: sudo docker network create sp-net

Get HTTPS-PORTAL and KeyCloak running

You'll need two (sub)domains, one for ShinyProxy and one for KeyCloak. Mine were sp.domain.com and sp-keycloak.domain.com. Add A records from these (sub)domains to your server's IP address.

Take a look at the KeyCloak Docker documentation.

Create a docker-compose.yml like the one in this repository. We don't have the KeyCloak credentials-secret, so we'll only start HTTPS-PORTAL, MariaDB, and KeyCloak for now: docker-compose up -d https-portal mariadb keycloak.

This compose file will spin up

• HTTPS-PORTAL exposed at ports 80 and 443 (make sure your firewall is configured such that these ports are exposed; and that they are the only ports exposed)
• KeyCloak on localhost:8010
• MariaDB (because Docker and MySQL don't get along due to TLS issues)
• (once it's working) ShinyProxy on localhost:8020.

HTTPS-PORTAL will route to either ShinyProxy or KeyCloak depending on the URL at which it is accessed.

I wasn't able to get the KeyCloak environment variables for setting database address or database password to work. We need to do so if we want to use a different database, or if we want another layer of security in between the system and the data.

KeyCloak Setup

Start by creating the initial admin user:

docker exec $CONTAINER_ID keycloak/bin/add-user-keycloak.sh -u admin -p admin123

and then restart the container as instructed, with docker-compose restart.

KeyCloak wisely disallows admin console access from anywhere outside localhost. So, from your dev machine, open a tunnel:

ssh -L 4000:localhost:8010 $MY_SERVER

Navigate to http://localhost:4000 in your browser and sign in with the initial admin credentials from above.

There's a zillion options! Fortunately we only need a few of them.

1. First, hover over "Master" in the upper-left corner and click "Add Realm." Name your realm. I used "shinyproxy".
2. Create your first user!
   1. Click "Users" in the left sidebar. Create a user. Only Username is required.
   2. Click on your newly created user. Click the "Credentials" tab. Set a temporary password. So you can log in as this user.
3. Click "Clients" in the left sidebar.
4. Click "Create." Name your client application. I used "shinyproxy" again.
5. On the main Settings page:
   1. Turn "Authorization Enabled" ON.
   2. Add https://sp.domain.com/* to "Valid Redirect URIs"
   3. Click "Save"
6. Click the "Credentials" tab in the top tab bar. On this page:
   1. Copy the Secret

ShinyProxy Setup

We're going to build a docker image for ShinyProxy much as described here.

Download the Dockerfile in this repo (it should be the same as the OpenAnalytics one) as well as the application.yml file.

Paste the Secret from the KeyCloak Credentials page into the eponymous spot in the application.yml file.

Run docker build . -t shinyproxy and docker-compose up -d.

One last piece before we're done: execute docker pull openanalytics/shinyproxy-demo to pull the Shiny demo apps that ShinyProxy references in the application.yml above.

You should now be able to navigate to sp.domain.com, be redirected to sp-keycloak.domain.com, log in as the user you created, be redirected back to sp.domain.com, and launch a Shiny App.

Shiny Setup

Install R / RStudio

Create R Shiny application

Package it up, but use FROM rocker/r-base:latest rocker/r-base:latest`

Hopefully this all works for you!