In all cases you need to start Sid
- In the browser go to https://sid.hmdc.harvard.edu
- Launch Sid
- Click
Run An Interactive Application
- Select RStudio
- Select Version
- Click Google drive (login if necessary)
- Select CPU/RAM
- Click
Launch Application
- Wait until URL is visible. The status will change from
Initializing
toRunning
- Click on the URL
You can now create a RStudio Project.
{% hint style="warning" %} Your RStudio home directory is on ephemeral storage. This means that when the container is deleted all the files will be lost. Store your files on Google Drive to save your work. {% endhint %}
Upon launching RStudio, your Google drive will be accessible from the file browser pane, located in the lower, right-hand corner of the window.
Using R libraries in RStudio is easy. Run the library
command in the Console tab:
library(tidyverse)
library(gridExtra)
If a library is not available and get an error like this. In this case the `dslabs` library is missing:
Error in library(dslabs): there is no package called ‘dslabs’
Install the package from within your notebook with:
install.packages("dslabs")
Some R libraries require additional system libraries. If the required system libraries are not installed, install.packages()
will report an error like this:
------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------
Configuration failed because libxml-2.0 was not found. Try installing:
* deb: libxml2-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
* rpm: libxml2-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)
* csw: libxml2_dev (Solaris)
If libxml-2.0 is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your
PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a libxml-2.0.pc file. If pkg-config
is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via:
R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...'
--------------------------------------------------------------------
To install additional system libraries, use the R function system()
to run sudo apt-get update
and sudo apt-get install
to install the Debian packages:
system("sudo apt-get update")
system("sudo apt-get install -y libxml2-dev")
If you are comfortable with programming external service calls, you can also use the https://sysreqs.r-hub.io/ service to automatically detect which system libraries are needed. (example)