This is a mix of the excellent guide by Dean Attali and a setting up a webserver guide I found here. I mean hire that guy for your shiny jobs!

Today [2018-02-19] I found another example (a bit more advanced) of deployment from git

A version controlled shiny-server

The final version of this server has shiny-server installed and working and can be controlled from your own computer.

There are some steps that need to be done on your computer and some on the server, it is relatively easy to work on your local computer and have an ssh window open to execute the steps on your server.

steps:

on the server

install shiny-server
install git
create empty and bare git-repo
copy the basic files from the server to your local computer (optional)

on your computer

create ssh key if you do not have one on your local computer
create local repo

on the server

add key to accepted list on server
create git-hook on empty bare repo

on your computer

add server as remote
push to repo
done!

prerequisites

In this gist I assume you have already ran the installer for shiny-server and before that installed all the necessary R packages. If you install all the packages as super user, they are available for every user, if you don't install them as superuser, install them under the user shiny.

setting up the repo on the server

I assume shiny-server is installed and the user shiny has not external password

install git according to your system (on ubuntu sudo apt install git )
create empty and bare git-repo

navigate to the folder '/home/shiny'
be user shiny (su shiny)
create a folder where you will connect to mkdir shiny-repo.git

copy the basic files from the server to your local computer (optional)

make your local version of the server

create ssh key if you do not have one on your local computer (this is different for every system)
create a local repo : something like shiny-repo

you could already add a basic shiny app in a folder inside shiny-repo Don't ever for the love of all you love, put a .Rmd file in the root of this folder, it took me 8 hours to debug that issue

continuouing on your server

add key to accepted list on server: you need to add your key to '~/.ssh/authorized_keys'
create git-hook on empty bare repo

move into the repo 'cd /home/shiny/shiny-repo.git'
create the git hook and make it executable (you can make this 2 steps, f.i. 'nano hooks/post-receive' and adding the #!/ ... etc.)

$ cat > hooks/post-receive
#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=/etc/shiny-server git checkout -f
$ chmod +x hooks/post-receive

On your computer again

add server as remote

move into your repo on your local computer 'cd shiny-repo'
add a remote to your repo 'git remote add shinyserver ssh://[email protected]/home/shiny/shiny-repo.git'

push to repo $ git push shinyserver +master:refs/heads/master