I deployed a rshiny app including some python packages and code some months ago and everything worked fine.
The .Rprofile contains only following line:
Sys.setenv(RETICULATE_PYTHON = "~/.virtualenvs/python35_env/bin/python3")
and the code of the server.R starts with
reticulate::virtualenv_create("python35_env", python = "python")
Just a few days ago, it stopped working, throwing the following error:
2021-12-20T17:40:58.940653+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Using Python: python3
2021-12-20T17:41:01.239337+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Creating virtual environment 'python35_env' ... Done!
2021-12-20T17:41:01.239598+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Installing packages: 'pip', 'wheel', 'setuptools', 'numpy'
2021-12-20T17:41:02.690808+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Collecting pip
2021-12-20T17:41:02.732623+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Downloading pip-21.3.1-py3-none-any.whl (1.7 MB)
2021-12-20T17:41:02.962565+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Collecting wheel
2021-12-20T17:41:02.971402+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Downloading wheel-0.37.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (35 kB)
2021-12-20T17:41:03.793226+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Collecting setuptools
2021-12-20T17:41:03.803019+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Downloading setuptools-60.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (952 kB)
2021-12-20T17:41:04.386370+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Collecting numpy
2021-12-20T17:41:04.395651+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Downloading numpy-1.21.5-cp38-cp38-manylinux_2_12_x86_64.manylinux2010_x86_64.whl (15.7 MB)
2021-12-20T17:41:05.134390+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Installing collected packages: pip, wheel, setuptools, numpy
2021-12-20T17:41:05.134406+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Attempting uninstall: pip
2021-12-20T17:41:05.226541+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Uninstalling pip-20.0.2:
2021-12-20T17:41:05.134754+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Found existing installation: pip 20.0.2
2021-12-20T17:41:05.228924+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Successfully uninstalled pip-20.0.2
2021-12-20T17:41:06.441805+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Attempting uninstall: setuptools
2021-12-20T17:41:06.442372+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Found existing installation: setuptools 44.0.0
2021-12-20T17:41:06.512016+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Uninstalling setuptools-44.0.0:
2021-12-20T17:41:06.518987+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Successfully uninstalled setuptools-44.0.0
2021-12-20T17:41:09.194416+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Successfully installed numpy-1.21.5 pip-21.3.1 setuptools-60.0.0 wheel-0.37.0
2021-12-20T17:41:09.291471+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Virtual environment 'python35_env' successfully created.
2021-12-20T17:41:10.109169+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Uninstalling pip-21.3.1:
2021-12-20T17:41:10.115167+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Successfully uninstalled pip-21.3.1
2021-12-20T17:41:09.950802+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Found existing installation: pip 21.3.1
2021-12-20T17:41:10.198396+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Using virtual environment 'python35_env' ...
2021-12-20T17:41:10.218600+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Warning in system2(python, c("-c", shQuote(command)), stdout = TRUE, stderr = TRUE) :
2021-12-20T17:41:10.218602+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: running command ''/home/shiny/.virtualenvs/python35_env/bin/python' -c 'import sys; import pip; sys.stdout.write(pip.__version__)' 2>&1' had status 1
2021-12-20T17:41:10.218771+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Warning in if (idx != -1) version <- substring(version, 1, idx - 1) :
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224992+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Error : invalid version specification ‘’, ‘ ’, ‘ ’
2021-12-20T17:41:10.220087+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: Warning: Error in : invalid version specification ‘’, ‘ ’, ‘ ’
2021-12-20T17:41:10.218772+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: the condition has length > 1 and only the first element will be used
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224887+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: 69: .make_numeric_version
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224885+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: 70: stop
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224888+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: 68: numeric_version
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224889+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: 66: reticulate::virtualenv_install
2021-12-20T17:41:10.224888+00:00 shinyapps[5354135]: 67: pip_version
It sounds somewhat related to following issue: Python virtual environment in R shinyapp.io stopped working suddenly , but the fix proposed there does not solve the problem. Does anyone have any hints?