These three functions provided by Shiny basically do the same. In fact, runGist() and runGitHub() are mere wrappers of runUrl(). They basically build the URL based on GitHub's standard taxonomy and call runUrl(). All these functions download all the files to a temporary folder on the local computer and execute them on the end user's side. Of course, if the application requires any file that is not included in the repository, it must be on the user's side. If an application calls a library and it is not on the end user's side, R will throw an error.

Both runGist() and runGitHub() point to a repository in GitHub. The main difference between them is that the first one is not necessarily associated to a user while the second one does. Apart from this, the gist repositories are identified with ID while the GitHub repositories have a name associated to them. For this reason, runGitHub() expects both username and repository name. The following is an example of both functions...