This app uses the ragnar, ellmer, and shinychat R packages to create an R Shiny Web app that lets a user ask natural language questions about Quarto tips I've collected over several years through attending presentations and conferences, reading blog posts, watching videos, and looking up questions online.
It was technically written by me, but largely with the help of generative AI: mostly Gemini Pro 2.5 and Posit's Shiny Assistant, but also other LLMs including the Custom GTP R and RStudio Tutor as well as Claude. The app itself uses OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini LLM.
I kept the tips in a spreadsheet so they were easier to search -- back in the days before LLMs let you ask and answer questions so easily from unstructured data! The app still has a tab that lets you see them all in the searchable table.
The app code is, unsurprisingly, in the app.R file. Quarto tips are in multiple places: QuartoTips.xlsx, as an R data frame are in tips_df.Rds, and an HTML file are in QuartoTips.html because that seems to be a good way to have ragnar process them. That processing of this specific HTML file is done in the process_quarto_tips.R script. You will need to run that before the Shiny app will work.
The file setup_package_installation.R should set up your system to install any needed packages you don't already have, but I haven't tested it extensively to make sure. If something else turns out to be missing, just install it manually!
To run this app locally, you'd need to have an .Renviron file that sets values for an OPENAI_API_KEY and QUARTO_TIPS -- the latter is the variable I use to hold the complete-path location of the duckdb database used by ragnar to search and retrieve relevant text for a user's query. Or you can set the environment variables manually for your session with code such as Sys.setenv("QUARTO_TIPS" = "path/to/your/tips.duckdb"). If you are running this remotely on a Shiny server, that .Renviron file should be in the same directory as your app.R file.
Reminder: First run the process_quarto_tips.R script to create your database. Then you can run the app.
You can see the app running on my Shiny server at https://apps.machlis.com/shiny/quartotips/. This is a tiny little server with a small amount of RAM hosting multiple apps, so please be patient with load times and system response 😅.
And speaking of load times and response, I didn't try to optimize performance on this app. It handles accordingly!