Using an R Conda Environment with RStudio

Goal: Detail how to use an R Conda Environment within RStudio.



Can We?

As detailed in this post: Should/can you run R Studio in Conda?

Yes, you can launch RStudio to use R that was installed inside a conda environment.

But Posit does not officially support this use case, so it might require some tinkering to get it working on your machine.

The process that will be detailed works as of time of writing this workshop.

We will monitor this process - but if this doesn’t work then please contact ARCC.


General Process

We will use the Conda Environment that we created in: Basic R Conda Environment

Process:

  1. Access OnDemand.

  2. Start an Interactive Desktop.

  3. Open a terminal.

  4. From the command-line set:

    # Using the path to your conda environment. # In this case: /project/<project-name>/software/conda-envs/r_4.3.3_env export PATH=$PATH:/project/<project-name>/software/conda-envs/r_4.3.3_env/bin/ export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=/project/<project-name>/software/conda-envs/r_4.3.3_env/lib/R/bin/R
  5. Load rstudio.

  6. Start rstudio from the command-line.


What did we do?

Using the path to the conda environment in which we setup R, we extended the PATH environment to this conda environments bin folder, and then set the RSTUDIO_WHICH_R environment variable to the R executable within this environment.

In General:

  1. export PATH=$PATH:<path-to-conda-environment>/bin/ export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=<path-to-conda-environment>/lib/R/bin/R

Can I use conda install rstudio?

There is a rstudio conda package, but this hasn’t been updated since early 2020.

Due to the age of this version, ARCC has not tried to use this old version.