Posit Workbench is the professional server version of the RStudio IDE. Compared to the popular, free RStudio IDE for local machines, it has the following advantages:
- Use of multiple R versions
- Ability to manage its users via centralized user databases (Active Directory, LDAP) via various protocols (SAML, OIDC, PAM, etc.)
- Option to run multiple sessions (with different R versions) side-by-side
- Centralized administration
- Resource monitoring capabilities
Posit also provides a free server-based version called RStudio Server Open Source (see also RStudio Server Open Source). In contrast to Posit Workbench, the free version
- can only use a single R version
- can only run one session per user at a time
- does not have a built-in database interface
- does not have monitoring capabilities
RStudio Server Open Source, the free community version of the workbench can be helpful for people who want to explore server side RStudio and therefore do not need a full license seat. However, the above limitations are quite restrictive for a productive work environment. In addition, the free version does not support a centralized user administration, e.g., via Active Directory users. Limiting resources per user is also not possible which might lead to memory management problems, resulting in situations were a user session can affect other users, e.g., memory overflow.
Additional features compared to a default Workbench installation
cynkra ships its workbench installation as customized container images compared to the default installation and configuration. We believe that these opinionated changes improve the user experience.
This is probably the “biggest” configuration change applied from our site. We have outlined the ideas behind this configuration in more detail in page Package Manager snapshots.
By including a full TexLive installation within our images, we ensure that all rmarkdown / LaTeX-related activities are trouble-free most of the time.
A variety of frequently used system libraries is included by default within our images. Some of these are required by specific R packages. Others are included for user convenience, e.g., gh or fish.
We have configured the Workbench installation so that if you start an R session in the terminal, you will by default get the same R version as the one you are running in your Workbench session.
renv is an R package for virtual package environments. One feature of renv is the use of a cache for package installations. If you install a package in an renv project, it ensures that a package is only installed once and otherwise linked to an existing resource on your machine. This resource/cache is by default user-specific and not accessible by anyone else.
By changing this and setting the global cache location to a shared directory, all Workbench users can make use of a central cache which is filled by all users on the system. This highly speeds up package installation once the cache has been filled and also saves disk space as it avoids redundant copies of the same R packages in every user’s renv cache.
For more details on this configuration, see “renv: shared cache”.
Similar to our R version setup, we ship multiple Python versions. The latest patch versions of the (maximum) most recent five minor versions starting from Python 3.8 are included.
Workbench - Introduction