R SIG Debian - Jan 2019 - Installing Rstudio and shiny free server on Debian

First, as I'm here and owe it: huge thanks to Dirk and others who maintain
the Debian packaging.

Second: I realise these questions are not right on topic here and I will go to
the rstudio community support next but I'm failing to find answers elsewhere
on the web which makes me suspect they haven't come up there and might well
be Debian specific so I suspect that if the expertise I'm looking for is
anywhere, it will be here.

Context: I've run an internet server on Debian systems for about 15 years
and Debian is the only distro I've ever used. I'm in the process of
moving some ancient, interactive forms that do simple things using CGIwithR to
Shiny apps as it'll clearly be way easier for me to create new ones and
update existing ones using shiny rather than CGIwithR. I'm starting off
using shinyapps.io but I'll have to install the free shiny server in the
near future as I can't afford the level at shinyapps.io I will need when I
have all the apps I want up and running.

My server is a VM set up by the excellent ISP, Mythic Beasts running: 
4.9.0-7-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u2 (2018-08-13) x86_64 GNU/Linux 

I don't want to do what can clearly be a challenging install on that machine
for fear of breaking things there so I've turned an old laptop (Toshiba
L-750) into a Debian machine but find I can only install i386 on it (neither
amd64 Stretch or Ubuntu install on it, they just hang very shortly after
starting the install).

So here I am having a dry run on that i386 stretch. For now I've got R up to
3.4.4 and pulled the shiny server down from
https://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb as per
https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/ |
https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/ and I've tried
installing it but it fails on a dependency on libgstreamer0.10-0 and on
libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0 and installing Rstudio seems to fail on the
first dependency.

Clearly I could start testing out the route of compiling both from source, or I
assume I could for the shiny server at least as the instructions seem to be
fairly clear.

However, I thought I'd ask here if anyone had any experience of installing
Rstudio and the free shiny server on Stretch.

Meanwhile, I'll go hunting around a couple of other old machines I have
around to see if I can find one that'll install amd64 Stretch!

TIA,

Chris

-- 
Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Visiting Professor, University of Sheffield <chris.evans at
sheffield.ac.uk>
I do some consultation work for the University of Roehampton <chris.evans at
roehampton.ac.uk> and other places but this <chris at psyctc.org>
remains my main Email address.
I have "semigrated" to France, see:
https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/semigrating-to-france/ if you want to book
to talk, I am trying to keep that to Thursdays and my diary is now available at:
https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/ecwd_calendar/calendar/
Beware: French time, generally an hour ahead of UK.  That page will also take
you to my blog which started with earlier joys in France and Spain!

Chris,

I fear you may be overcomplicating things.  RStudio tends to just work; the
.deb files are also large and "mostly self-contained" -- so that
generally
only require one or two other packages you should find without trouble.  Of
course I cannot fully speak to your experience as I do not run Debian stable
(mostly current Debian (ie "testing") or Ubuntu (ie now 18.10) for
me), as
well as Docker rather than VMs.

The README at the RStudio site also tends to cover what you need. And no, I
don't think I know a single person who'd recommend compiling from
source.

So I would say just try it and if something comes up come back here, and we
will try to help. Lastly, recall that installations of packages should be
fully reversible (unless you do unspeakable things).  So if for whatever
reason the .deb does not install, no harm done.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org

Thanks Dirk,

I wonder if I'm hitting problems you're not seeing not only because of
running stretch/stable but also because of running the i386 version.  I suspect
most people are on 64 bit systems now.

Anyway, I have managed to install Rstudio OK by going up to stretch-cran35. 
Rstudio wouldn't install from there:

root at Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386:/etc/apt# apt-get install rstudio
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package rstudio is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'rstudio' has no installation candidate

But pulling the i386 deb from
https://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb got me the
complaint about libgstreamer:

root at Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386:/home/chris/Downloads# gdebi
rstudio-1.1.463-i386.deb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree        
Reading state information... Done
Reading state information... Done
This package is uninstallable
Dependency is not satisfiable: libgstreamer0.10-0

But I then found
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/277238/is-it-possible-to-install-both-gstreamer-0-10-and-gstreamer-1-0-at-the-same-time
and followed the advice there:

"I managed to get processing-video 2.2.1 to work, installing the
corresponding Debian Jessie .deb files downloaded via https://pkgs.org:
    gstreamer-0.10-gconf
    gstreamer-0.10-plugins-base
    libgstreamer0.10-0
    libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0"

I pulled down those last two, installed them with dpkg -i, and now Rstudio has
installed from the Rstudio deb I had pulled down and, on a cursory check, it
seems to work fine.

The rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb also says it's installed but is, not to
my surprise, giving error messages rather than starting up:

root at Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386:/home/chris/Downloads# dpkg -i
rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb
Selecting previously unselected package rstudio-server.
(Reading database ... 174017 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack rstudio-server-1.1.463-i386.deb ...
Unpacking rstudio-server (1.1.463) ...
Setting up rstudio-server (1.1.463) ...
groupadd: group 'rstudio-server' already exists
rsession: no process found
Created symlink
/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/rstudio-server.service ?
/etc/systemd/system/rstudio-server.service.
Job for rstudio-server.service failed because the control process exited with
error code.
See "systemctl status rstudio-server.service" and "journalctl
-xe" for details.
? rstudio-server.service - RStudio Server
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/rstudio-server.service; enabled; vendor
preset: enabled)
   Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2019-01-12
19:54:34 GMT; 29ms ago
  Process: 4107 ExecStart=/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/rserver (code=exited,
status=127)

Jan 12 19:54:34 Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386 systemd[1]: Failed to start RStudio
Server.
Jan 12 19:54:34 Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386 systemd[1]: rstudio-server.service:
Unit entered failed state.
Jan 12 19:54:34 Toshiba-L750-Stretchi386 systemd[1]: rstudio-server.service:
Failed with result 'exit-code'.


I will do some more sleuthing around to see if I can get beyond that but from
what I'm seeing in https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/
I may be at a dead end here as I think the deb that I am trying to install there
is the one for Debian 8 and it looks as if they've only rolled a deb for
amd64 for Debian "9+"

Last question, to everyone, for tonight:

Has anyone been able to download and install the server on a 64bit Debian
stretch system?

TIA,

Chris

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dirk Eddelbuettel" <edd at debian.org>
> To: "Chris Evans" <chrishold at psyctc.org>
> Cc: "r-sig-debian" <r-sig-debian at r-project.org>
> Sent: Saturday, 12 January, 2019 14:58:10
> Subject: Re: [R-sig-Debian] Installing Rstudio and shiny free server on
Debian
> Chris,
> 
> I fear you may be overcomplicating things.  RStudio tends to just work; the
> .deb files are also large and "mostly self-contained" -- so that
generally
> only require one or two other packages you should find without trouble.  Of
> course I cannot fully speak to your experience as I do not run Debian
stable
> (mostly current Debian (ie "testing") or Ubuntu (ie now 18.10)
for me), as
> well as Docker rather than VMs.
> 
> The README at the RStudio site also tends to cover what you need. And no, I
> don't think I know a single person who'd recommend compiling from
source.
> 
> So I would say just try it and if something comes up come back here, and we
> will try to help. Lastly, recall that installations of packages should be
> fully reversible (unless you do unspeakable things).  So if for whatever
> reason the .deb does not install, no harm done.
> 
> Dirk
> 
> --
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org
-- 
Chris Evans <chris at psyctc.org> Skype: chris-psyctc
Visiting Professor, University of Sheffield <chris.evans at
sheffield.ac.uk>
I do some consultation work for the University of Roehampton <chris.evans at
roehampton.ac.uk> and other places but this <chris at psyctc.org>
remains my main Email address.
I have "semigrated" to France, see:
https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/semigrating-to-france/ if you want to book
to talk, I am trying to keep that to Thursdays and my diary is now available at:
https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/ecwd_calendar/calendar/
Beware: French time, generally an hour ahead of UK.  That page will also take
you to my blog which started with earlier joys in France and Spain!