Installation

Prerequisites

System and Platform Requirements

RStudio Workbench runs on most modern Linux distributions, and can be accessed in most modern browsers. See the following link for detailed information on supported server and browser platforms as well as recommended minimal CPU, RAM, and disk storage requirements.

RStudio Workbench System Requirements

R Versions

RStudio requires a previous installation of R version 3.0.1 or higher; see Installing R for instructions on installing R on your specific Linux distribution.

We recommend installing multiple versions of R. An environment with multiple versions of R helps you provide a stable, reproducible environment for your R developers. Install R using the directions at https://docs.rstudio.com/resources/install-r/.

User Home Directories

RStudio interacts frequently with user home directories. If you mount home directories with NFS, we recommend using the async mount option along with a modern, high-throughput network connection that can support many simultaneous clients. If you’d like your users to be able to share their projects with each other, see the section on Project Sharing for additional NFS requirements.

If you mount home directories with EFS, we recommend the following settings for the best performance:

  • Use the general purpose performance mode, rather than Max I/O mode.
  • In most cases you should use bursting behavior, rather than provisioned throughput.
  • Mount the file system using the Amazon package efs-utils.
  • We recommend provisioning EC2 instances that are memory or compute optimized (do not choose general purpose instances), and choose the network enhanced options, e.g., r5n.2xlarge.
  • Use CloudWatch to monitor usage and identify system performance bottlenecks.
  • Project Sharing must be disabled. For more information, see Project Sharing.
  • File locking must use the advisory type. For more information, see File Locking.
Note

You may experience slower performance in certain areas as EFS is not performant when reading and writing thousands of small files. For example, installing certain R packages with a lot of C++ header files or working with projects that require reading a large number of files.

Please refer to Using Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) with RStudio Team for more details on recommended settings and configurations.

Database Connectivity

Since version 1.4, RStudio also requires database connectivity. In most cases, no additional configuration is needed - a SQLite database will be created and used automatically. However, if you are running a load-balanced setup, you will be required to set up a PostgreSQL database for RStudio Workbench to connect to; if one is not configured, the service will refuse to start. If you are using load balancing, make sure that you have an available PostgreSQL database to use before installation! See the Database section for more information.