Installing RStudio on TSD

While installing RStudio is not like installing a package, so this package it self cannot help you with that. However, since RStudio has become the most used IDE for R, and is not readily available on TSD, we have compiled here a tutorial on how to get Rstudio working for your TSD project.

Switching to RHEL7

By default all new TSD linux users are allocated a Virtual Machine (VM) using Redhat 6. Unfortunately, there is just a single, very old RStudio that works on this VM. Contact USIT and request that all users on your project be moved to RHEL7 (you can also do this for insgle users if you dont want to move all). Remember that new users will still be allocated a RHEL6 VM, so when you get new coworkers, make sure they are given the correct VM from the start, or else RStudio will not work for them.

Get the latest RStudio

Go to Rstudio’s webpages and download the latest tarball version availale for Fedora 19/Red Hat 7. Import this file into TSD for install.

# Make a folder for common tools for your project, with a subfolder for rstudio
mkdir -p /cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio

# Move the rstudio tar
mv /tsd/pXXX/data/durable/file-import/pXXX-member-group/rstudio-1.3.1073-x86_64.tar.gz /cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio

# Go to the folder
cd /cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio

# Extract the tar-ball
tar xvzf rstudio-1.3.1073-x86_64.tar.gz

There should now be a folder /cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio/rstudio-1.3.1073.

You could theoretically have several versions of RStudio installed on your TSD project simultaneously. In order to help yourself and your users over time, we suggest having the newest version symlinked to current, so that when you install a new version, all you need as an administrator is to update the symlink after install, and all users will have their RStudio updated.

# Set the new Rstudio to be the current one with a symbolic link
ln -s rstudio-1.3.1073 current

To confirm the symlink has been made correctly, have a look in the folder using the -l option. The symlinked current version will point to which folder it is symlinked to, meaning if you peak inside the current folder, you are actually peaking into the rstudio-1.3.1073 version.

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx   1 p32-user  staff    4096 Jul 30 09:46 current -> rstudio-1.3.1073
-rwxrwxrwx   1 p32-user  staff    4096 Apr 22 09:14 rstudio-1.3.1073

When you install a new version of RStudio after this, you will first need to remove the symlink, before you can make a new one.

rm -r current
ln -s rstudio-1.3.1100 current

ls -l

-rwxrwxrwx   1 p32-user  staff    4096 Aug 19 12:04 current -> rstudio-1.3.1100
-rwxrwxrwx   1 p32-user  staff    4096 Apr 22 09:14 rstudio-1.3.1073
-rwxrwxrwx   1 p32-user  staff    4096 Aug 19 10:33 rstudio-1.3.1100

create alias to open rstudio.

Now that RStudio exists on the system, your users need to be able to open the program from the terminal. To do so, you need to make the RStudio executable file available to them.

This means that users need to place one of the following line in their .bash_profile to make it available to them

# Make an alias
alias rstudio=/cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio/current/bin/rstudio

# OR add to the path of executables
export PATH=/cluster/projects/pXXX/tools/rstudio/current/bin/:$PATH

Saving this in $HOME/.bash_profile, restarting a terminal, and now Rstudio should be available by terminal command rstudio.

If you still cannot make it work with these steps, report an issue. If you know of additional needed steps for successful install, either do a direct PR for adding that information to this document, or , report an issue. We’d love feedback to improve the instructions!