I've twice encountered problems while trying to deploy Shiny applications on the shinyapps.io hosting platform, and since the fix was the same in both cases, I think a pattern is emerging. In both cases, the issue has to do with use of the includeMarkdown function to display help text written in Markdown and stored in a file within the application. The includeMarkdown function is provided by the htmltools library, which is apparently loaded automatically by the shiny library. So my code explicitly specifies library(shiny) but does not load htmltools.
In both problem cases, the code ran fine on my PC but not on the server. Why? A little "fine print" in the documentation of the includeMarkdown function mentions that it requires the markdown package. I have that installed on my PC, and apparently it gets loaded automatically. The server deployment system, though, apparently does not realize the need for it. So on the server my code loads the shiny library explicitly, and that causes the server to include the htmltools library but not the markdown library.
The solution is trivial: just add include(markdown) in the source code. The hard part is remembering to do it, given that it is unnecessary on my PC.
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