R shiny - background of sidebar panel

Question

Let's say, I've got a simple shiny application and I would like to change sidebar panel background. I've tried with css, but I've managed only to change the whole background. Can you help me?

My ui.R:

    library(shiny)

    shinyUI(fluidPage(
      includeCSS("www/moj_styl.css"),

      titlePanel("Hello Shiny!"),

      sidebarLayout(
       sidebarPanel(
          sliderInput("bins",
                      "Number of bins:",
                      min = 1,
                      max = 50,
                      value = 30)
        ),

        mainPanel(
          plotOutput("distPlot")
        )
      )
    ))

and my server.R:

    library(shiny)

    shinyServer(function(input, output) {

      output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
        x    <- faithful[, 2]  # Old Faithful Geyser data
        bins <- seq(min(x), max(x), length.out = input$bins + 1)

        hist(x, breaks = bins, col = 'darkgray', border = 'white')
      })

    })

and moj_styl.css:

    body {
        background-color: #dec4de;
    }

    body, label, input, button, select { 
      font-family: 'Arial';
    }

Answer 1

Try this:

library(shiny)

ui <- shinyUI(fluidPage(
  tags$head(tags$style(
    HTML('
         #sidebar {
            background-color: #dec4de;
        }

        body, label, input, button, select { 
          font-family: "Arial";
        }')
  )),
  titlePanel("Hello Shiny!"),

  sidebarLayout(
    sidebarPanel(id="sidebar",
      sliderInput("bins",
                  "Number of bins:",
                  min = 1,
                  max = 50,
                  value = 30)
    ),

    mainPanel(
      plotOutput("distPlot")
    )
  )
))

server <- shinyServer(function(input, output) {

  output$distPlot <- renderPlot({
    x    <- faithful[, 2]  # Old Faithful Geyser data
    bins <- seq(min(x), max(x), length.out = input$bins + 1)

    hist(x, breaks = bins, col = 'darkgray', border = 'white')
  })

})

shinyApp(ui=ui,server=server)

The sidebar doesn't have any other attributs than 'col-sm-4' when initialized so you can either use jQuery and some logic to figure out which is the propper column to color (so that we only set the background of the sidebar), or you can give a id to the form nested in the column and color the background of this form.