St. Andrews Park

A Shiny mobile app for residents of St. Andrews Park, Venice, Florida.

What it does

• Maps 388 property owners across 14 subdivisions
• Search owners by name, address, or subdivision
• Shows Venice city boundary and demographic facts
• Lists nearby EPA-monitored beach conditions
• Links to city services, county resources, and community documents

Data sources

• Owners — Sarasota County Property Appraiser (SCPA); updated weekly via data-raw/update_owners.R
• Subdivision boundaries — Sarasota County GIS plat layer
• Venice boundary — Sarasota County GIS municipal boundary layer
• Beaches — EPA beach monitoring data

Weekly update

source("./data-raw/update_owners.R")

Downloads fresh SCPA data, joins to stable geometry, overwrites data/owners.rds.

Geometry

Owner point locations were geocoded via Google API, manually corrected in QGIS (multi-unit buildings share a street address and required individual point placement), and saved as data-raw/addresses/owners_moved.gpkg. This file is the stable geometry source. Account numbers follow the property, so only ownership attributes need refreshing weekly.

Deployment problems and solutions

1. Workflow YAML syntax error The SSH heredoc (<< 'EOF') inside a YAML run: block conflicted with YAML parsing — red triangle in Gitea, no logs. → Replaced with a quoted multiline SSH string.

2. Runner not picking up jobs The workflow used container: debian:bookworm-slim just to get SSH, forcing the runner to pull a Docker image on every run. → Removed the container block, reverted to runs-on: ubuntu-latest using the cached runner image.

3. Runner was repo-scoped, not user-scoped The act_runner was registered specifically for another repo. stAndrews showed zero runners and jobs stayed queued forever. → Re-registered the runner at the user level via Gitea User Settings → Actions → Runners.

4. Two runner instances competing A manual pkill + manual restart created a second runner process alongside the systemd service, both sharing the same UUID. → Killed the duplicate, leaving only the systemd-managed instance.

5. Gateway Caddyfile import silently failing The import /data/projects/r/*/Caddyfile.snippet directive was never evaluated — the gateway container only mounts the Caddyfile itself, not the project directories. → Added the stAndrews route directly to the gateway Caddyfile.

6. renv activating inside the container The volume mount .:/srv/shiny-server put .Rprofile into the container, triggering renv to try installing its own library and conflicting with packages already installed in the image. → Switched to selective mounts (./data and ./www only). App code is baked into the image; only runtime data is volume-mounted.

7. owners.rds deleted from disk git rm --cached data/owners.rds removed it from git tracking but also wiped the file from the filesystem. → Ran update_owners.R inside the rstudio container to rebuild it from the SCPA source.

Note: building footprints not used

Sarasota County publishes a building footprint GIS layer that could derive accurate centroids without geocoding. However the footprint layer carries only a street number (buildingid) with no street name — making a direct attribute join to SCPA records ambiguous across multiple streets. A spatial join via street centerlines would resolve this but adds complexity. Since accurate geometry already exists in owners_moved.gpkg and St. Andrews is a built-out community with no new construction, the footprint approach was deferred. It remains the right path if the app is ever extended to additional subdivisions.