Install RStudio Server Natively on ARM Machine

This tutorial will install the followings from scratch. The procedure has been tested on Raspberry PI 4B (ARMv8, x64 Debian buster). However, it might also work on x86 machines as well. The tutorial might take 2+ hours. Therefore think twice on whether it's worth it.

R (4.1.0)
RStudio-server (v1.4.1106)

For future versions of R or RStudio, this tutorial might work as well. However, there could be small adjustments.

Requirements

x64 Linux system (Debian or Ubuntu)
patience and willing to read terminal messages (this is not a tutorial for noobs)
bash terminal (not csh, tcsh, zsh, nor sh)
Deactivate conda if you have it installed (see below)

If you have conda installed, please do the followings. Do NOT simply run conda deactivate.

Backup ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile)
Go to ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile), use your favorite editor (I prefer vim or nano) to open it, scroll to lines starting with # >>> conda initialize >>> and ending with # <<< conda initialize <<<, remove these lines. They will screw up your installations.
Start a new terminal. If you use ssh, exit and login again.

Install R

Debian buster installs R-3.5 by default. Following the instructions of R-cran official website often ends up with failure (r-base-core version is wrong). Therefore I choose to compile R from scratch. If you already have R installed, skip this section.

Open terminal, enter:

sudo apt-get install libbz2-dev build-essential libpcre2-dev \
  fort77 gfortran gcc gobjc++ openjdk-11-jdk openjdk-11-jre-headless \
  libssl-dev libssh2-1-dev libv8-dev libxml2-dev libfftw3-dev \
  libtiff5-dev libhdf5-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev xorg-dev \
  libtiff-dev libcairo2-dev texlive texlive-fonts-extra texinfo \
  libblas-dev liblapack-dev liblzma-dev libreadline-dev

Please make sure before answering Y to install these packages, no previous packages are removed (0 to remove)! If any packages are removed, google the potential issues of replacing such packages

This is for Raspberry Pi OS. In other systems, you might need to install libX11-devel, libv8-3.14-dev, gcc-multilib as well. Also the openjdk versions might be different.

Compile and install R-4.1.0

RVER="R-4.1.0"
wget https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-4/$RVER.tar.gz
tar -xf ./$RVER.tar.gz
cd ./$RVER
./configure --enable-memory-profiling --enable-R-shlib
make
sudo make install

You can change RVER="R-4.1.0" to other versions (like RVER="R-4.0.5")

Check if R is installed. The following command should return R path (something like /usr/local/bin/R)

which R
# /usr/local/bin/R

(Optional) Check device capabilities. Some graphics devices need X11 and cairo. If you cannot plot figures. Please refer to this article on my previous solutions.

Rscript --no-save -e "capabilities()"

Finally, clean up installation files

cd ..
rm $RVER.tar.gz
rm -rf ./$RVER

Install RStudio Server

Credits:

Please read the above two links. There are couple of changes.

Install prerequisites:

sudo apt install git pandoc lsof npm python libuser1-dev ant debsigs \
  valgrind libglib2.0-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
  dpkg-sig expect fakeroot gcc gnupg1 libacl1-dev libattr1-dev \
  clang bzip2 cmake libboost-all-dev libxml-commons-external-java \
  lsof make mesa-common-dev patchelf python rrdtool uuid-dev \
  wget zlib1g libcap-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libffi-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev libpam0g-dev libpango-1.0-0 libpq-dev libssl-dev \
  libuser1-dev openjdk-11-jdk libsqlite3-dev libxml2-dev

Please make sure before answering Y to install these packages, no previous packages are removed (0 to remove)! If any packages are removed, google the potential issues of replacing such packages

Please read the following notes before proceeding

If you don't have R installed, add r-base
openjdk version might be different on your machine
The changes are: clang-4 --> clang, libsqlite0-dev --> libsqlite3-dev, added npm
I haven't tried yet, but pandoc might not be needed
If some libraries are not available, might just remove them or to find alternatives.

Check clang version

clang --version
> clang version 7.0.1-8+deb10u2 (tags/RELEASE_701/final)
> Target: aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
> Thread model: posix
> InstalledDir: /usr/bin

In my case, it's version 7. Change the following clang-7 and clang++-7 to whatever version you have. For example, if you have version 11.x, then use clang-11. You can always use ls /usr/bin | grep clang to see if the files exist.

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang clang /usr/bin/clang-7 100
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/clang++ clang++ /usr/bin/clang++-7 100

Download and extract RStudio

Choose desired RStudio version by editing VERS variable. Download rstudio server as follows:

VERS=v1.4.1106

mkdir /tmp
cd /tmp
wget -O $VERS https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/tarball/$VERS
mkdir /tmp/rstudio
tar xvf /tmp/$VERS -C /tmp/rstudio --strip-components 1
rm /tmp/$VERS

Install dependencies (a.k.a the long step part 1)

cd /tmp/rstudio/
sudo mkdir -p /opt/rstudio-tools/panmirror
sudo cp src/gwt/panmirror/src/editor/yarn.lock /opt/rstudio-tools/panmirror/
sudo cp src/gwt/panmirror/src/editor/package.json /opt/rstudio-tools/panmirror/

cd /tmp/rstudio/dependencies/common
./install-dictionaries
./install-mathjax
./install-pandoc
./install-sentry-cli

# needs npm!
./install-npm-dependencies

# This can run without boost library
./install-packages &

# Will take long to run
./install-boost
./install-soci

In ./install-soci, you need to make sure sqlite3 is linked correctly (read the terminal messages!). If compile failed, fix the issue by adding required libraries, then go to /opt/rstudio-tools/ and sudo rm -rf /opt/rstudio-tools/soci, followed by re-runing ./install-soci.
./install-packages will install some R packages. It can go in parallel.
./install-boost will take long to run. Go and get a coffee. However, soci might require boost library, so no parallel installation can be done here.

Build RStudio server (a.k.a the long step part 2)

Once dependencies are installed, run

cd /tmp/rstudio
mkdir build
sudo cmake -DRSTUDIO_TARGET=Server -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Go work out in the gym!

Install and register RStudio server as a service

Install:

cd /tmp/rstudio
sudo make install

Add rstudio-server as an user and register the service

sudo useradd -r rstudio-server
sudo cp /usr/local/extras/init.d/debian/rstudio-server /etc/init.d/rstudio-server
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/rstudio-server 
sudo ln -f -s /usr/local/lib/rstudio-server/bin/rstudio-server /usr/sbin/rstudio-server

# Setup locale
sudo apt-get install -y locales
sudo DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive dpkg-reconfigure locales
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

# Start the service for the first time
sudo /etc/init.d/rstudio-server start

# Enable at start-up
sudo systemctl enable rstudio-server

Clean-ups

sudo rm -rf /tmp/rstudio/
sudo rm -rf /opt/rstudio-tools/depot_tools/
sudo rm -rf /opt/rstudio-tools/soci/
sudo rm -rf /opt/rstudio-tools/boost/
sudo apt-get autoremove

Configure rstudio-server

Credit: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200552316-Configuring-the-Server

First, stop the service and add two files:

sudo rstudio-server stop
sudo mkdir /etc/rstudio/
sudo touch /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf
sudo touch /etc/rstudio/rsession.conf

Next, edit the following configurations accordingly. Check here for details.

# Listen to port 8787
echo "www-port=8787" | sudo tee -a /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf
echo "www-address=0.0.0.0" | sudo tee -a /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf
echo "rsession-which-r=$(which R)" | sudo tee -a /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf

# No session time out
echo "session-timeout-minutes=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/rstudio/rsession.conf

Finally, update and restart the service

sudo rstudio-server verify-installation
sudo rstudio-server start

How, go to http://127.0.0.1:8787 you should be able to see the login screen.

dipterix / arm-rstudio-server

Install RStudio Server Natively on ARM Machine

Requirements

Install R

Install RStudio Server

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