RStudio Server AMI

This Packer template builds an Amazon Machine Image based on the latest Amazon Linux 2 distribution and includes the following dependencies for R and some commonly-installed packages:

• C and C++ compilers
• Java
• curl
• readline
• various image processing libraries (libpng, cairo, pango)
• pandoc
• OpenBLAS
• PostgreSQL
• zeroMQ
• git

R 3.6.3 is compiled with OpenBLAS and then RStudio Server is installed.

To build:

packer build \
  -var 'subnet_id=subnet-abcd0123' \
  -var 'ssh_keypair_name=foo' \
  -var 'ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/foo.pem' \
  -var 'instance_type=t2.small' \
  rstudio-server-ami.json

Launching instances with the AMI

The first time an instance is launched, you can log in to RStudio with rstudio as the username and the instance ID as the password. Note that the password might not work immediately as it is set shortly after the first launch. The R file that is initially open will ask you to set a new password.

To use compile Markdown documents into PDF, use the tinytex package.