Unattended Installation/Upgrade of RStudio Connect

slodge · July 29, 2021, 2:03pm

I'm currently trying to dig my way through some server admin (not my strongest skill!)

For security and reproducibility reasons, I need to get RStudio Connect to upgrade silently. Looking at the install script - https://cdn.rstudio.com/connect/installer/installer-v1.9.2.sh - this seems to be an option... there are some "UNATTENDED" flags near the top of that script.

I'm working my way through this now - learning as I go. I was wondering if there is any documentation/help about how to use this mode? I can't see anything about it on any of:

cole · August 4, 2021, 2:59am

Great questions! By "silently" / "unattended," do you mean non-interactive in the sense that you are using scripts / automation / infrastructure-as-code etc. to install or upgrade Connect?

It is unfortunate that our documentation does not make this pattern super clear. I am hopeful that we will soon get to a proper apt/yum repository, which will simplify this whole process considerably! In the meantime, the best place I know to reference is where we build our Docker containers:

github.com

rstudio/rstudio-docker-products/blob/9c1d41a48c04961f4ffdb1aa3adfa6a0d3ea49b9/connect/Dockerfile#L53-L58

    
      
          RUN apt-get update --fix-missing \
              && curl -L -o rstudio-connect.deb https://cdn.rstudio.com/connect/$(echo $RSC_VERSION | sed -r 's/([0-9]\.[0-9]\.[0-9]).*/\1/')/rstudio-connect_${RSC_VERSION}~ubuntu18_amd64.deb \
              && gdebi -n rstudio-connect.deb \
              && rm -rf rstudio-connect.deb \
              && apt-get clean \
              && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

I have to admit that we used to use the installer.sh script in a non-interactive fashion and ran into enough trickiness / confusion that we went back to using the .deb directly. For a non-interactive installation, sometimes that is easiest.

Unfortunately, it is not very pretty It is also potentially prone to issues in URLs changing / etc. Again, until we have an apt / yum repository, I think this is the best we have I hope that helps though!

If you can say any more about your use case, it would definitely help me present that case while we are looking to build the apt/yum repositories and simplifying this process for our own internal automation!

EDIT: it is worth noting that this approach requires more explicit choices with operating system, architecture, etc. The script mostly tries to abstract some of that annoyance away.

slodge · August 4, 2021, 5:49am

Thanks for the detailed response. That dockerfile looks helpful - thanks.

If you can say any more about your use case

Holiday just started... so may take 10 days before I can look at this... but basically:

we have some automated scripts to setup our servers (ansible)
these servers persist - they aren't tear down and start again
initially we installed RStudio Connect on them using a curl on the .deb file (as that was in the old installation instructions)
we're now looking at how to run RStudio Connect upgrades via those scripts
personally I'd rather do those upgrades manually (I'm worried the upgrade going wrong and breaking the installation) but I've been persuaded to investigate the automation route on a test server

cole · August 4, 2021, 12:37pm

That makes perfect sense, thank you!! We have some stateful servers managed via chef that sounded like a very similar use case, so this clarification is quite helpful, thank you!

I'll see if I can dig up some documentation on how to use the scripts non-interactively and what the problem I encountered before was. Have a great holiday!!