bslibdash

bslibdash gives you the vocabulary of a dashboard — a page shell, a sidebar menu, cards, KPI tiles, header widgets — built on top of bslib and Bootstrap 5. Because it’s a thin layer over bslib, dashboards built with bslibdash inherit your theme, dark mode and bslib::bs_themer() for free, and play nicely with other bslib-based Shiny packages like teal.

If you know shinydashboard, you already know most of the bslibdash API: function names and arguments mirror it wherever the underlying concept is the same, so porting an existing app is mostly search-and-replace.

Features

• A responsive page shell: header, collapsible/overlay sidebar, body and footer.
• Sidebar navigation with menus, sub-items, badges and a user panel.
• Cards that collapse, close and go full-screen, plus tabbed cards.
• KPI tiles — value boxes and info boxes on the Bootstrap status palette.
• Header widgets for messages, notifications and tasks.
• Full theming through bslib::bs_theme(): components recompile their CSS automatically, so custom themes never lose bslibdash styles.

Installation

bslibdash isn’t on CRAN yet. Install the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("Novartis/bslibdash")

Usage

library(shiny)
library(bslibdash)

ui <- dashboardPage(
  header = dashboardHeader(title = "bslibdash demo"),
  sidebar = dashboardSidebar(
    sidebarUserPanel("Jane Doe", subtitle = "Administrator"),
    sidebarMenu(
      id = "sidebarMenu",
      menuItem("Overview", tabName = "overview", icon = icon("house")),
      menuItem("Reports",  tabName = "reports",  icon = icon("bar-chart"))
    )
  ),
  body = dashboardBody(
    tabItems(
      tabItem(
        "overview",
        boxLayout(
          valueBox("128", "Open tickets", icon = icon("inbox"),
                   color = "primary"),
          valueBox("42%", "CPU load",     icon = icon("cpu"),
                   color = "warning"),
          infoBox("Status", "Healthy",    icon = icon("heart-pulse"),
                  color = "success")
        ),
        box("Hello, world!", title = "Welcome",
            status = "primary", collapsible = TRUE)
      ),
      tabItem("reports", box("Report body", title = "Quarterly"))
    )
  )
)

shinyApp(ui, server = function(input, output, session) {})

For a full walk-through of every component, run the kitchen-sink demo:

shiny::runApp(
  system.file("shiny/examples/14_kitchen_sink", package = "bslibdash")
)

Why bslibdash?

• vs raw bslib — bslib gives you the building blocks (themes, cards, sidebars). bslibdash assembles them into a dashboard: a page shell, a sidebar menu with sub-items and badges, header dropdowns, KPI tiles — so you don’t rebuild them in every app.
• vs shinydashboard — same names, same mental model, but rendered with Bootstrap 5 and themed through bslib. Dynamic theming, dark mode and bs_themer() work out of the box.
• vs bs4Dash — bslibdash stays close to vanilla bslib, so dashboards inherit your bslib theme rather than carrying a bespoke AdminLTE one.

Because bslibdash is just bslib underneath, it also slots into apps built with teal, raw bslib::page_*() layouts, shinyuieditor and bsicons — all sharing the same theme, dark mode and bs_themer() machinery as your dashboard shell.

Learn more

• Get started — a minimal skeleton and a migration guide from shinydashboard.
• Components — a copy-pasteable tour of every component.
• Theming — customise brand_bs_theme(), swap Bootswatch presets, add your own SCSS, and use bslib::bs_themer().
• Function reference — every exported function, organised by topic.
• More example apps live in inst/shiny/examples/.

Getting help

If you find a bug, please open an issue with a minimal reproducible example. To propose a change, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code of Conduct

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.