#35: apt install rstudio quarto
Welcome to the 35th post in the ravishingly rabiant R recommendations, or R4. Today’s post is about apt and R tools.
Many of us have been running RStudio off our local machines for as long as binaries have been provided. Which is by now probably a bit over a decade. Time flies.
And as nice it is to have matching binaries, in my case in the .deb format used on Debian or Ubuntu, it is wee bit a painful to manually download a file and then install it. Twice the pain if you are lucky enough to be on a system where you can also run RStudio Server. And now three times as painful as you may need a matching quarto-cli binary for the nice quarto service.
So wouldn’t it be nice to have an apt-getable repo? And to autoMAGICall get updated versions when they are available? Oh yes. And I had been bugging JJ from day one. And JJ would almost listen intendly, nod briefly and firmly, and issue an assured we will look into it. Well, they are still looking…
Luckily, years ago, Carl wrote a helper script for our use in Rocker. I promptly adopted these and kept them in the littler examples directory as a pair of script getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r, later complemented by getQuartoCli.r. And I used these for years, somewhere between weekly and monthly.
But it is still very manual: three script calls, one sudo dpkg -i call. And as our good friends at RStudio don’t seem to be coming forward with a repo, I created one at GitHub thinking I could serve the files via GitHub Pages. Which … of course I cannot as the .deb file for rstudio is well above the 100mb limit. So that seemed to be a bit of a setback. But after a bit of pondering, and recognizing that I am now in the fortunate position to have symmetric broadband access at home, I reckoned that until the bandwidth use gets excessive I will serve this as ‘truly personal package archive’ (or tPPA) from here. Note that this is calibrated for my use so Ubuntu amd64 it is. Nothing else. And that it installs ‘dailies’. Which may cause issues for some people. You have warned. Reading tis paragraphs signifies agreement with the terms and limitations. Just kidding.
A quick screenshot from an update earlier is here. Note that I use the fabulous wajig wrapper by Graham Williams here as my frontend to apt, dpkg and more as I have for even longer than I have use RStudio. Its use is tangential here; sudo apt upgrade would have done the same (and is essentially being called). And it demonstrates the main benefit: we are now automated as the cron scheduler launches an update of the PPA at which ever frequency you chose (currently twice a week for me) and after that it becomes part of the normal apt updates we do anyway (and which I do about daily). So that’s main gist: automated apt upgrades of rstudio, rstudio-server, and quarto-cli.
And you can find the underlying code in the GitHub repo ppa-rstudio which I put together a good week ago. I am currently updating the ‘tPPA’ twice a week from crontab and have had two full upgrades already.
And who knows, maybe with a bid of prodding RStudio may come around. One can always hope.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.
This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.
