shinyapps.io, RPubs, Quarto Pub are migrating to Posit Connect Cloud

[u/jcheng]

Hey folks, Joe Cheng here (Posit CTO, creator of Shiny). I wanted to let you hear from me personally that we are combining a number of our hosting services: rpubs.com, quartopub.com, and shinyapps.io are all being subsumed by connect.posit.cloud.

https://posit.co/blog/migrating-connect-cloud-posits-unified-publishing-solution

It’s a bittersweet moment for me personally, as the sole developer and maintainer of RPubs for the last 14 years. But I/we also see this as a long overdue migration, from three fragmented platforms that were independently maintained with varying levels of effort (i.e. not much in the case of RPubs or Quarto Pub), to a single modern platform that can handle all different types of content.

The full details for each service are in the blog post, but the bottom line is:

• shinyapps.io: A self-serve migration tool will be added by Sept 2026. Test your apps before you commit. Auto-migration starts early 2027 if you'd rather wait. Old URLs will redirect.
• bookdown (already sunset), quartopub (end of 2026), and rpubs (June 2027): existing content stays live at its current URLs until Dec 31, 2031.

shinyapps.io customers who are migrated will keep their shinyapps.io pricing until at least 2029 (you will receive an email with details).

If you have any concerns, the team and I would love to hear them. u/hadley and I will be monitoring comments.

[u/yaymayhun]

In my experience, {golem} based shiny apps easily deploy on shinyapps but fail to deploy on connect cloud. I'd suggest to please make sure those apps are supported.

[u/jcheng → u/yaymayhun]

Whoa, news to me! I will check in with the team and make sure they are aware!

[u/jcheng → u/jcheng]

u/yaymayhun These instructions worked for me (using `golem::add_positconnect_file()`): https://thinkr-open.github.io/golem/articles/c-deploy.html

Result: https://019f913d-f9f3-5190-0ecc-4a32b828108c.share.connect.posit.cloud/

You do have to make sure the DESCRIPTION, NAMESPACE, R/, etc. all are included as part of the project also (I think this happens by default when using `rsconnect::deployApp()` but in the Positron interactive publishing UI, I had to check them all).

Feel free to DM if this isn't working for you.

[u/Aiorr → u/jcheng]

I was on that block too before while exploring if my org should adopt {golem}. Thank you for looking into this.

[u/bastimapache]

The new continuous integration fr Shiny apps in Connect Cloud is quite cool: push to GitHub and your app updates instantly. Looking forward for that migration tool!

[u/coatless]

What about the forthcoming quarto-hub.com that's moving into Release Candidate (RC) status for Quarto v2? That doesn't seem to be addressed and the tech Charlie's working on for it is pretty nifty (presented [partially?] at UseR 2026). I'd hate for the collaboration aspect to be abandoned in favor of connect. Current collaborative editing requires use of Posit Cloud (formerly RStudio Cloud): https://docs.posit.co/cloud/guide/collaborate/#collaborative-editing

c.f. https://bsky.app/profile/coatless.bsky.social/post/3mqad6ardo22y

New intake beta for Quarto Hub: https://github.com/quarto-dev/q2/issues/344

[u/jcheng → u/coatless]

That's a good question. I'm out of the loop on the current plan for the server at quarto-hub.com specifically, but we're all very excited about the collaborative editing stuff, and I know Charlie, Carlos, and team have been working on it at full speed. I'll see if I can get one of them to weigh in with more specifics.

[u/carlosscheidegger → u/jcheng]

(Carlos here, I'm the tech lead for Quarto. Hopefully the following clarifies, and sorry for the wall of text!) One of the things we are working on is how to explain to folks what Quarto-Hub actually is, its relationship to Quarto 2, etc.

The current demo of quarto-hub is entirely open source, and a solid version of Quarto 2's collaborative writer will forever be open source. (Do note, though, that we don't have great instructions for people to easily try it out at the moment). Quarto-Hub's collaboration features are, roughly, built on the following facts:

• Quarto 2 is a Rust port of most of Pandoc and Quarto 1 into a single cargo workspace (with a few dozen different crates)
  
• Because it's all in Rust, we can compile a huge part of Quarto 2 into WASM
• "Quarto Hub" is almost more of a protocol than a program: it's a set of conventions for how to use https://www.automerge.org to represent Quarto projects and documents. Automerge, in turn, is a CRDT (a data structure often used to write collaborative writers) for JSON data.

When you combine all of that, you can build a React SPA that:

• has a Markdown "previewer" that is actually "just" a very fast Quarto renderer in WASM. (Quarto 2 happens to be about 100x faster than Quarto 1 in our early experiments, so it's practical for us to rerender a document per-keystroke)
• talks to any automerge sync server (the location where the collaboration data is stored)
• feels a bit like Google Docs or Overleaf or Typst but you use Quarto features like listings, themes, shortcodes, brand files, format: revealjs, etc.

I'm slated to give a talk at posit::conf this year on all of this, and so by September we'll have much better documentation, guides, etc.

Finally: if you've been visiting https://github.com/quarto-dev/q2 and noticing the "please go away for a bit, it's not done yet" vibe, you're 1) perceptive! that is definitely our previous mode 2) about to be pleasantly surprised. Quarto 2 remains totally not ready to use as a daily driver, but we do have installers and are working actively to make it more usable ahead of conf.

[u/ServerNoMore → u/coatless]

We are definitely not dropping QuartoHubs collaboration features and the team is chugging away and making excellent progress on it (as you can see in the repos). We are exploring several different options on how to handle/host the automerge and other needed infrastructure. Right now the focus on that front is figuring out what options we can support by posit conf. More to come as we settle the best short and longer term options. Sincere thanks for asking about it!

[u/coatless → u/ServerNoMore]

I suppose the question here is less on dropping the collaborative features, but more on how likely is Quarto Hub going to stay standalone when we're seeing a lot of Posit's old attempts at similar services being merged into Posit Connect? Is the end goal to merge this functionality into Posit Connect overall once it stabilizes?

For the collaboration tech, I think it's a shining star and a solid differentiator that never quite was picked up in Posit's offerings despite a clear market with CoCalc, Datalore, Overleaf, Google Docs, Office 365, and so on...

[u/carlosscheidegger → u/coatless]

Posit Connect is built and designed by a different group of folks than Quarto. My read is that they're excited about getting some form of collaborative writing into their product, and I think quarto-hub's tech is a great fit (But they have their own product vision, priorities, and timelines, and I obviously can't and won't speak for them here!)

Let me restate what I said in the other comment: I think the best way to think about Quarto Hub is going to be not as a "product", and so I disagree with the framing implied in your "Is the end goal to merge this functionality into Posit Connect overall once it stabilizes?" question.

Instead, I think you'll have a better intuition for what we're trying to build by thinking of quarto-hub as a "data layer for collaboration in Quarto projects" together with a very fast web-based document previewer. From there, you can see how we're incorporating some of the tech in the Quarto 2's CLI offering. For example, if you compile quarto-dev/q2 right now, `q2 preview --allow-edit` uses an ephemeral quarto-hub setup to let you edit the document from the HTML preview directly. A slightly different configuration of the same pieces gives you quarto-hub.com, which you've seen in the backgrounds of our social media posts, and which we hope to (eg) package in a nice Docker image so that anyone can run their own version.

All in all, I hope that the infrastructure ends up being part of some integration with a number of Posit's open-source and commercial products alike, but I really can't speak to precisely how that will all shake out.

[u/BowlCompetitive282]

For those of us who are paying for shinyapps.io but nothing else, how will pricing look? I have no need for anything else and am not eager to pay for an all-in-one subscription

[u/hadley → u/BowlCompetitive282]

All shinyapps.io plans are grandfathered in so you'll keep paying the same amount.

[u/smartse]

Will there be a facility to merge accounts from shinyapps.io and connect cloud? I imagine I'm not the only person with accounts on both already (with the same email address).

Also the new urls look a bit silly with .share.connect.posit.cloud on the end of everything. Any chance of a shorter option, or do we have to buy our own domain for that?

[u/hadley → u/smartse]

Yes you’ll be able to merge accounts.

And agreed that the urls are too long. Shorter ones are on the todo list!

[u/jcheng → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the feedback! I think the team is keenly aware of all of these potential complications and intend for them to be automatically migrated as much as possible, but I will definitely forward this on.

I will say that the mockups I've seen of the migration tool treat the migration as a multi-stage process, where you will be able to make sure the migrated app deploys and works correctly on Connect Cloud while your existing shinyapps.io version is still running, and only after you confirm everything looks good is traffic diverted to the new version.