Deploying the R Studio on HPCs

Pranav Swaroop Gundla — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:36:05 +0000

This guide provides a streamlined approach for deploying RStudio Server on HPC environments with resource-rich configurations, enabling researchers to leverage computational power for data-intensive R workflows.

Overview

The R studio has to be build with the help of docker or apptainer to extract the image
You can use this link for r-base image and use the appropriate version which can suit your better working-case.
For Docker you use this

docker pull rocker/r-base

For Apptainer (Formerly Singularity) you can use the following Recipe for the image creation for R-base and R-studio server.

Bootstrap: docker
From: rocker/rstudio:4.0.0

%post
    apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
        sudo \
        locales \
        pwgen \
        gdebi-core \
        && apt-get clean

    # Set locale
    echo "en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /etc/locale.gen
    locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

    # Create rstudio user
    useradd -m rstudio
    echo "rstudio:rstudio" | chpasswd
    adduser rstudio sudo

    # Add default R profile if needed
    echo "options(repos = c(CRAN = 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))" >> /home/rstudio/.Rprofile

%environment
    export USER=rstudio
    export PASSWORD=rstudio
    export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

%runscript
    echo "Starting RStudio Server..."
    exec /init

%labels
    Maintainer your_username
    Version 4.0.0

%startscript
    exec /init

Build It on HPC (Interactive Node)

singularity build rocker_rstudio.sif rocker_rstudio.def

You need to be on a node with network access and Singularity (or Apptainer) installed.
This SLURM script sets up an RStudio Server instance using Singularity containers, automatically configuring SSH tunneling for secure remote access to your HPC-hosted RStudio environment.

SLURM Job Script

#!/bin/sh
#SBATCH --time=08:00:00
#SBATCH --partition=partition_name
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=8
#SBATCH --mem=49152
#SBATCH --output=/home/%u/rstudio-server.job.%j

# Set your project directory containing the Singularity container
export PROJECT_DIR=/path/to/your/project/containers

echo "Current hostname: ${HOSTNAME}"

# Dynamically allocate an unused port to avoid conflicts
# Reference: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/132524
readonly PORT=$(python3 -c 'import socket; s=socket.socket(); s.bind(("", 0)); print(s.getsockname()[1]); s.close()')

# Display connection instructions
cat 1>&2 <<END
=================================================================
RStudio Server Setup Complete
=================================================================

1. SSH tunnel from your local workstation:
   ssh -N -L 8787:${HOSTNAME}:${PORT} your_username@your_hpc_login_node

2. Open your web browser and navigate to:
   http://localhost:8787

3. When finished, terminate the job:
   - Exit RStudio Session (power button in top-right corner)
   - Run: scancel -f ${SLURM_JOB_ID}

=================================================================
END

# Launch RStudio Server with Singularity
singularity exec \
    --bind $PROJECT_DIR/etc:/etc/rstudio \
    --bind $PROJECT_DIR/tmpfs/lib:/var/lib/rstudio-server \
    --bind $PROJECT_DIR/tmpfs/run:/var/run/rstudio-server \
    --bind /etc/resolv.conf:/etc/resolv.conf \
    --bind /etc/ssl/certs:/etc/ssl/certs \
    $PROJECT_DIR/r_latest.sif \
    rserver --www-port ${PORT} --auth-none 1 --auth-pam-helper rstudio_auth

printf 'RStudio Server session terminated\n' 1>&2

Setup Requirements

1. Directory Structure

Ensure your project directory contains the following structure:

/path/to/your/project/containers/
├── r_latest.sif          # R Singularity image
├── etc/                  # RStudio configuration files
├── tmpfs/
│   ├── lib/             # RStudio server library files
│   └── run/             # Runtime files

2. Singularity Container

Use an R Singularity image (.sif file) with RStudio Server pre-installed
Ensure the image includes your required R packages and dependencies

Usage Instructions

Deployment

Submit the job:

   sbatch rstudio-server.sh

Monitor job status:

   squeue -u $USER

Check output for connection details:

   cat ~/rstudio-server.job.[JOB_ID]

Access

Create SSH tunnel (replace placeholders with your values):

   ssh -N -L 8787:compute_node:assigned_port username@hpc_login_node

Open browser and navigate to http://localhost:8787

Cleanup

Exit RStudio session properly using the power button
Cancel the SLURM job: scancel -f [JOB_ID]

Resource Configuration

The script allocates:

Time limit: 8 hours
CPUs: 8 cores
Memory: 48 GB (49152 MB)
Tasks: 1

Adjust these parameters based on your computational requirements and cluster policies.

Benefits

Scalable: Leverage HPC computational resources for R workflows
Secure: SSH tunneling ensures encrypted remote access
Isolated: Containerized environment prevents conflicts
Flexible: Dynamic port allocation avoids scheduling conflicts

Troubleshooting

Port conflicts: The script automatically selects available ports
Container issues: Verify Singularity image path and permissions
SSH tunnel: Ensure proper firewall and network configuration
Job limits: Check cluster policies for resource constraints

Adapted from the rstudio-slurm project

Better plots for Statistics display - ggstatsplot

Pranav Swaroop Gundla — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 12:11:27 +0000

I thought I would write my #firstpost about this. If you've done any plotting in R, you've almost certainly used ggplot2 while it offers a simple approach to making plots, they are sometimes but ggstatsplot is an extension to it. It provides a variety of statistical tests including a text rich plots for better visualizations.

The link to the github repo is ggstatsplot.

This a very useful plotting technique has statistical details, which makes data exploration simpler and faster.

a quick peek of the ggbetweenstats code:

# for reproducibility
set.seed(123)
library(ggstatsplot)

# plot
ggbetweenstats(
  data = iris,
  x = Species,
  y = Sepal.Length,
  title = "Distribution of sepal length across Iris species"
)

Everything in detail is presented in the github repo for more details do visit!

Credits: Indrajeet Patil

DEV Community: Pranav Swaroop Gundla