bootstrap-vm.md

Creating an RStudio Virtual Machine

Overview

Here we will walk you through how to create a Virtual Machine (VM) on a project with RStudio running.

Time to complete: About 5 minutes

Click the Start button to move to the next step.

Getting the Shiny Requirements Shell

First we will download the shell file to your cloud shell directory to run the shiny application. These 2 commands will pull in the shell file vmshiny.sh and run it (may take a minute or 2)

gsutil cp gs://streamline-startup-scripts/vmshiny.sh ./
source vmshiny.sh

If this fails, you need to request access to gs://streamline-startup-scripts.

Overview of what’s going on

The vmshiny.sh is running a docker pull command on a Docker image that we created running shiny that is based on https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned2. Then the script runs docker with -p 3838:3838 which forwards the port 3838 to the Cloud Shell.

Running the Shiny App

Just trying a URL

This URL should open up in a new window with the shiny application.

https://shell.cloud.google.com/devshell/proxy?port=3838&environment_id=default&devshellProxyPath=/create_vm

Use Web Preview

Click the Web Preview Icon and change the port to 3838 since that’s what Shiny typically runs on, including this docker container.

Then add /create_vm to the end of the URL to navigate to that application if the initial page is simply the Shiny landing page.

Conclusion

Done!