shinyseo

shinyseo is a small helper package for Shiny apps that need social and search metadata.

It builds one shiny::tags$head() fragment containing:

canonical URL
description
Open Graph tags for Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and similar previews
Twitter Card tags
optional schema.org JSON-LD
optional Bing, Google, Yandex, Baidu, Naver, Facebook, and Pinterest verification

The package accepts either a YAML file path or a named list.

If you only need the short contract: there is one exported function, social_meta(). It returns a shiny::tags$head() fragment that belongs in the UI of a Shiny app.

What it does

When you call social_meta(), the package:

Reads metadata from YAML or uses the list you pass in.
Fills in safe defaults for common fields like locale, robots, and Twitter card type.
Checks that the required fields exist.
Builds HTML tags for Shiny UI.
Adds JSON-LD unless you turn schema off.

API in short

social_meta(meta):

meta may be a YAML path or a named list
title, description, url, and image are required
if meta is a character string, it is read with yaml::read_yaml()
missing keys use package defaults where provided
schema = FALSE disables JSON-LD output
any other value of schema keeps JSON-LD enabled

Config cheat sheet

Minimal configuration:

title: "Example app"
description: "A short app description."
url: "https://example.no"
image: "https://example.no/share.png"

Common extras:

Field	What it does
`locale`	Sets Open Graph locale and schema language default
`robots`	Controls the robots meta tag
`twitter_card`	Sets the Twitter card type
`site_name`	Sets `og:site_name`
`twitter_site`	Sets `twitter:site`
`twitter_creator`	Sets `twitter:creator`
`image_alt`	Sets `og:image:alt`
`twitter_image_alt`	Sets `twitter:image:alt`
`bing_site_verification`	Sets Bing verification
`google_site_verification`	Sets Google Search Console verification
`yandex_site_verification`	Sets Yandex Webmaster verification
`baidu_site_verification`	Sets Baidu Webmaster verification
`naver_site_verification`	Sets Naver Webmaster verification
`facebook_domain_verification`	Sets Facebook domain verification
`pinterest_domain_verification`	Sets Pinterest domain verification
`schema`	Set to `FALSE` to disable JSON-LD

If you want shared defaults across several apps, you can set these in .Renviron and let app-level YAML override them when needed:

SHINYSEO_BING_SITE_VERIFICATION
SHINYSEO_TWITTER_SITE
SHINYSEO_TWITTER_CREATOR

What belongs where

Use .Renviron for values that are shared across many apps on the same machine or deployment:

SHINYSEO_BING_SITE_VERIFICATION
SHINYSEO_TWITTER_SITE
SHINYSEO_TWITTER_CREATOR

Keep per-app values in each app’s meta.yml:

title
description
url
image
locale if one app differs from the shared default
site_name if one app needs a different display name
twitter_site or twitter_creator if one app should override the shared default
bing_site_verification if one app needs a different Bing token

SHINYSEO_GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_MEASUREMENT_ID is not used by shinyseo itself. If you use GA4, keep that in your server or deployment config instead of in meta.yml.

Quick use

library(shiny)
library(shinyseo)

ui <- fluidPage(
  social_meta("meta.yml"),
  h1("My app")
)

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

shinyApp(ui, server)

You can also pass a list directly:

social_meta(list(
  title = "Example app",
  description = "A short app description.",
  url = "https://example.no",
  image = "https://example.no/share.png"
))

Vignettes

The long-form package docs live in vignettes:

If the package is installed, you can also open them with browseVignettes("shinyseo").