RStudio Server on OS X El Capitan
Motivation
This is the result of trial and error until I got RStudio Server working in my network.
I have a powerful Mac Pro server and I wanted to use that computing power from my “old” iMac (i.e. to do calculations in a fraction of the time that it would take using my own iMac’s resources)
Homebrew setup
There is a good tutorial for older versions of OS X here. With El Capitan it won’t work, or at least didn’t work for me.
If you don’t have Homebrew installed you’ll need to install it first.
Run these lines from terminal:
brew update
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install r openssl ant
brew install homebrew/science/rstudio-server
Beware that this will relink the R binaries to /usr/local/bin
. It will also install the last R version (3.3.1 on October 21, 2016). Therefore, it would be a good idea to uninstall the previous R version that you have or you will be misusing your drive space.
Additional steps
The last part won’t make rstudio-server
running. Similar to what I asked on stackexchange you’ll need some additional steps:
Copy a pre-made plist:
sudo cp /usr/local/opt/rstudio-server/share/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
Check permissions:
sudo chown root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
sudo chmod 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
Modify the plist and enable rstudio-server
autostart:
sudo nano /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
and replace the content by this
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.rstudio.launchd.rserver</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/local/opt/rstudio-server/bin/rserver</string>
<string>--server-daemonize=0</string>
<string>--auth-minimum-user-id=500</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
Copy a pam:
sudo cp /etc/pam.d/ftpd /etc/pam.d/rstudio
Launch the daemon and start rstudio-server
(i.e. sometimes you can’t restart your server without affecting other users):
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.rstudio.launchd.rserver.plist
sudo rstudio-server start
Create rstudio
group (additional step not mentioned on stackexchange):
Go to System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Add
, create a group named rstudio
and click all the users you want to authorize to use rstudio-server
.
Using rstudio-server
From your server go to localhost:8787
and you should be able to login usign your OS X credentials.
To login from another computer on the same network, from your browser go to your server’s IP on port 8787 (e.g. 123.45.67.89:8787
)