Customizing RStudio environment in Docker container
If, like me, you use an ephemeral container (using the --rm flag), then the container gets deleted when stopped. This is a good thing as it ensures a 100% clean environment every time but it means settings are not preserved from session to session.
Unlike many popular IDE, rstudio settings are not stored in a user-accessible transparent json, although they are working on it.
A workaround is copying over the settings to the right location:
- keybindings:
/home/rstudio/.R/rstudio/keybindings/rstudio_bindings.json - general settings (such as theme):
/home/rstudio/.rstudio/monitored/user-settings
To set it up:
- Launch rstudio in a container
- Set your desired settings
- Back up the 2 files listed above somewhere on your host.
- Copy over the config files every time you start rstudio - see script below.
I have created a quick launch shortcut pointing to the following script which is easily adapted. It starts a container named rstudio and copies over the settings I have backed up (in my case from /home/asac/projects/rstudio-config)
#!/bin/bash
echo Running rstudio on localhost:8787
docker run -d --rm -p 8787:8787 -e PASSWORD=<pwd> \
-v /home/asac/projects:/home/rstudio/projects \
-v /home/asac/data:/home/rstudio/data \
--name rstudio asachet/shiny-dev
echo Copying over rstudio settings
docker exec rstudio mkdir /home/rstudio/.R/rstudio/keybindings -p
docker cp /home/asac/projects/rstudio-config/user-settings rstudio:/home/rstudio/.rstudio/monitored/user-settings
docker cp /home/asac/projects/rstudio-config/rstudio_bindings.json rstudio:/home/rstudio/.R/rstudio/keybindings/rstudio_bindings.json
echo Launching browser
xdg-open http://localhost:8787
NEW IN 2020
With RStudio v1.3, there is a new file ~/.config/rstudio/rstudio-prefs.json which controls all of the settings. You can copy it between machines or hand-edit it.
More details in the RStudio Server PR which got ported to RStudio in version 1.3.