Installing RStudio Server + Updates

One of the most difficult things I try to teach my students is how to deal with error messages. Due to Hurricane Laura, I am currently re-creating several projects including formr, RStudio, and a website. I thought I would detail that here.

You can find my first post on formr here: https://www.aggieerin.com/post/formr-installation-instructions/

Good news! It’s mostly the same and pretty smooth. However, I sometimes get this nonsense: installation of package ‘psych’ had non-zero exit status - any time you get the non-zero exit status message, it requires a careful look at the installation messages. I wasn’t actually trying to install psych but it’s a dependency for something down the line, so let’s see what it’s missing.

When I try to install psych, I get a message that mnornt is not available. Ok, let’s try that one. Then I find the real culprit: package ‘mnormt’ is not available (for R version 3.6.3) … the version of opencpu from my previous instructions did not include R4.0. Thankfully, the new version does:

# Requires Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) or 18.04 (Bionic)
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:opencpu/opencpu-2.2
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

# Installs OpenCPU server
sudo apt-get install -y opencpu-server
# Done! Open http://yourhost/ocpu in your browser

# Optional: installs rstudio in http://yourhost/rstudio
sudo apt-get install -y rstudio-server

And you can install rstudio-server as well quickly! Win for me! Unfortunately, I will now chase down all the packages that I have to reinstall for R4.0 now…

The next thing I ran into was this: E: Unable to locate package python-pip … like what?

That’s because I only have python3 installed, so instead do this:

sudo apt install python3-pip 
pip3 install supervisor

Now, I think mysql must have updated (yes, this is version 8 now) because you need to update database creation as well:

  CREATE DATABASE formr DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
  CREATE USER 'formr'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'EnterPassword';
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON formr.* TO formr@localhost;
  FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
  quit;

RStudio bases users on the users for the system, so I just made new users that way:

sudo adduser newusername

This action will prompt you to enter a password twice, then a few other optional pieces of information. I also made myself an account that wasn’t root and added myself as a sudo (master) user. Only do this step if you want to give a user power to do all the things.

sudo usermod -aG sudo newuser