At one of my clients I run RStudio under Citrix in order to have access to their data.
For the most part this works fine. However, every time I visit them I spend the first few minutes of my day installing packages because my environment does not seem to be persisted from one session to the next.
I finally had a gap and decided to fix the problem.
Where are the packages being installed?
Installed packages just spontaneously disappear… That’s weird. Where are they being installed?
# Install package under Citrix.
install.packages("devtools")
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/andrewcol/Documents/R/win-library/3.5’
It looks like the packages are being installed into a folder on my C: drive. But if I look for that folder it’s not there.
How does this make sense?
A bit of investigation revealed that the folder is actually on the C: drive on the Citrix server (rather than my local machine).
I confirmed this by installing the same package using RStudio running on my local machine.
# Install package on local.
install.packages("devtools")
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/AndrewCol/Documents/R/win-library/3.4’
Note the difference in the path (andrewcol versus AndrewCol) and R versions.
Environment
I know that files on my network H: drive will not disappear between sessions, so this seems like a natural place to install packages. I can make this happen by changing the R_LIBS_USER environment variable.
# Environment on Citrix.
Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")
[1] "C:/Users/andrewcol/Documents/R/win-library/3.5"
We’ll assign a new value by setting up a .Renviron file. Where should this file live? On my local C: drive, my network H: drive or the Citrix server C: drive?
# Environment on Citrix.
Sys.getenv("R_USER")
[1] "C:/Users/andrewcol/Documents"
Okay, so it needs to go on the Citrix C: drive. This is really the crux of the entire process, because if you put it on H: or local C: then it will not be picked up by RStudio on Citrix.
Writing to Citrix C:
It turns out that it’s remarkably difficult to access C: on the Citrix server. I couldn’t get there using File Explorer. I couldn’t create a new file there using Notepad or RStudio.
No problem! Write an R script.
renviron <- file("C:/Users/andrewcol/Documents/.Renviron", "w")
cat(
"R_LIBS_USER='H:/myCitrixFiles/Documents/R/%p-library/%v'",
"R_USER='H:/myCitrixFiles/Documents'",
file = renviron,
sep = "\n"
)
close(renviron)
That’ll create the .Renviron file in the right place and insert the required content. Note the use of the %p and %v placeholders which will be automatically replaced with the appropriate platform and R version. See ?R_LIBS_USER. Thanks to Henrik Bengtsson for reminding me about that!
Quick check that it’s been created.
setwd("C:/Users/andrewcol/Documents")
list.files(all.files = TRUE)
readLines(".Renviron")
Restart RStudio under Citrix. Packages will be installed to H: and should not mysteriously disappear between sessions.