Unable to use ${USER} variable in default working dir configuration (rsession.conf)

[plednicky]

Hello RStudio Community,

environment:
R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20)
RStudio (free) version 1.1.463
RHEL 7.6

I'm trying to use following configuration in rsession.conf to set the default working directory:

session-default-working-dir=/data/${USER}/
session-default-new-project-dir=/data/${USER}/

After restart of rstudio-server service and restart of my session I can see that I'm still working in originally set '~' location.

When I've tried to change this to:

session-default-working-dir=/data/my_user_id/
session-default-new-project-dir=/data/my_user_id/

it was working without any issues, but of course only for my user/dir.

Log from journalctl:

May 21 14:13:02 hostname.local rsession-domain_account[60269]: ERROR system error 13 (Permission denied) [path=/data/${USER}/, target-dir=]; OCCURRED AT: rstudio::core::Error rstudio::core::FilePath::createDirectory(const std::string&) const /root/rstudio/src/cpp/core/FilePath.cpp:846; LOGGED FROM: void rstudio::session::::ensureDefaultDirectory(std::string*, const std::string&) /root/rstudio/src/cpp/session/SessionOptions.cpp:66

My user is the owner of the /data/username/ dir with rwx rights.

I'm trying to set this up, because multiple users will be working on this server and I would like to separate their workspaces. If there's any other way - I'm open to suggestions.

I'm also quite new to RStudio, so I do apologize in advance if I'm making some newbie mistake.

Thank you all for help.

Regards,
Peter

[kevinushey]

To the best of my knowledge, we don't try to expand environment variables used in these configuration options. Why don't you want to use the user's default home directory?

[plednicky]

One of the users was trying to first copy his data to /home and hitting the issue with no free space available (/home being much smaller than /data in our server).

If there's no other way, we will instruct users to use ~ only for their scripts and /data/username for their analysis data.

Thank you for quick reply.