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 and Google site 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
`schema`	Set to `FALSE` to disable JSON-LD

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").