Introducing Polished.tech

Polished.tech is our new software service that makes it easier than ever to add modern authentication to your Shiny apps.

Implementing authentication from scratch is inefficient and increases the probability of security vulnerabilities. Hand rolling custom logic to encrypt credentials, reset passwords, verify email addresses, etc. is a tedious, error-prone process. Wouldn’t it be nice if an R package handled this boilerplate code for you?

Yea, we thought so too. That’s why we created the polished R package. Polished provides sign in and registration pages with all the accompanying bells and whistles your users expect from a modern web app. Polished is secure, customizable to your brand, allows social sign in (with Google, Microsoft, and Facebook), and more. Check out all available features at polished.tech and try out a demo Shiny app using polished.tech here.

Polished has been available for installation from GitHub for about a year now. Over this past year, the biggest drawback to using polished was that polished required a substantial level of effort and domain experience to setup and maintain.

With the introduction of polished.tech, polished is now much easier to setup, maintain, and update. Before polished.tech, you had to provision a PostreSQL database and a plumber API to use polished. With polished.tech, we host the database and API for you. Enabling polished user authentication is now as easy as installing the polished R package, creating a polished.tech account, and copying and pasting a few lines of code. Check out the official getting started docs for details.

I personally am extremely excited about polished.tech. It has been a long time in the making. It is free to create a polished.tech account, and there is a free tier for basic usage. If you are looking for a modern authentication solution for your Shiny apps, I would be thrilled if you try out polished.tech.