Reading a CSV from a Private GitHub Repo in a Deployed Shiny App

Here is how to read a file from a private Github repo

Note that this method requires you to send your GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) to Shinyapps. Therefore we will use a fine-grained token to limit access to only the repo that contains the data.

1. Create a private Github repo and place your .csv file there. The data file in my example code is My_CSV.csv.

2. Generate a fine-grained GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) for the repo(s):

   a. Go to your Github account settings (not repo settings): Settings --> Developer Settings --> Personal Access Token --> Fine-Grained Token --> Generate New Token

   b. If you have 2FA set up you may have to enter a 2FA code here.

   c. Name the token, choose the expiration date, and select the repo(s) that the token grants access to.

   d. Select the appropriate permissions (since I only READ data from my repo, under Repository Permissions I set Actions and Contents to "read-only").

   e. Click Generate Token and copy it.

3. If you don't have an .Renviron file in your Shiny app folder, create one. This is simply a text file called .Renviron.

4. Open the .Renviron file and add this line to it, pasting in your own generated PAT: GITHUB_PAT=github_pat_78s6fads6f7asd6f7a6sd767sd6f7as6d7fasd7f7asd76f7adf67

5. Deploy your app including the .Renviron file.

Use this code in your app to authenticate and load your data:

library(readr) # Or not, read.csv() can be substituted for read_csv()
library(httr)

# Create path to Github file
repo_owner <- "My_Github_Name"   # Put the owner of the Repo here
repo_name <- "My_Repo_Name"      # Put the name of the Repo here
branch <- "main"                 # Put the Repo branch here
repo_file <- "My_CSV.csv"        # The name of the .csv file you want

url <- paste0(
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/",
  repo_owner, "/", repo_name, "/", branch, "/", repo_file
)

# Get github PAT from .Renviron (!!make sure you include the .Renviron file in your push to shinyapps.io!!)
github_pat <- Sys.getenv("GITHUB_PAT")

# Request content from Github, use the PAT for authentication
# The .csv fill will be returned in response$content
response <- GET(
  url,
  authenticate(user = "", password = github_pat)
)

# Check for errors and assign response$content to a variable
# If you're reading e.g. images, you can use `raw` in place of `text` and the proper function that reads images
if (response$status_code == 200) {
  data <- read_csv(content(response, "text"))
} else {
  stop("Failed to fetch data: ", response$status_code)
}