Many users like to customise their RStudio environment to look a certain way or to store certain keyboard shortcuts etc. You can do this inside an RStudio instance under the Tools menu > Global Options. This article details how you can save any customisations so that they persist across different server environments.
Currently in ecocloud, RStudio reads it’s configuration and settings from ~/.rstudio. This location can’t be changed at the moment. Within ecocloud the home folder ( ~/ ) is not persisted across server restarts. Only the contents within the ~/workspace folder are persisted across server restarts.
Steps to make RStudio customisations persistent:
Initial Setup:
1. Start an R Server (Tools > R (RStudio & Jupyter))
2. Open a Terminal window
3. Run the following commands in Terminal
mkdir -p ~/workspace/.rstudio
ln -s ~/workspace/.rstudio ~/.rstudio
4. Start RStudio and configure your environment as normal. All settings will be stored inside the workspace folder, which is persistent across different server environments. Note: when you're finished with the server, rather than just closing the tab it is better to go to File > Quit Session. This will ensure all settings are appropriately saved. From here you can then Terminate your whole server environment from your ecocloud Dashboard.
5. When starting a new server simply follow steps 1 through to 3 and RStudio will pick up the configuration inside the workspace folder.
In future we’ll be looking into making this a more user friendly opt-in or opt-out feature within ecocloud. Watch this space for updates.