sve.md

Using R/RStudio on the SVE service

What is the SVE?

A windows virtual desktop

The SVE offers two services:

• Win 10 Student service - this one has research & academic software suites such as RStudio etc. But it does not have persistence. This means that any packages you install or any repos you clone into your local space will vanish when you log out. The only exception is if you:
  • clone the repos to your MyDocuments/OneDrive account
  • work out how to use your Windows profile to 'host' the packages (or do some nifty work with the renv package)
• Win 10 Staff service - this is a generic staff service intended for admin & professional staff use (for now). While it does have persistence, it does not have RStudio installed...

Why would I use the SVE?

1. The 'Student' service hosts most of the applications you'll need including RStudio etc
2. It offers easy access to data folders such as J:// as you are effectively working 'on campus'. This makes data loading fast. Well... faster than doing it over your home broadband.
3. You can easily access your oneDrive folders.
4. The virtual PC instance you log in to has reasonable memory allocation so unless you have huuuge datasets you should be OK.

But:

1. No R package or repo persistence (see above)
2. It does not seem to be able to 'mount' Sharepoint/Teams folders - so you cannot easily load data held in them

Git

Git is installed on the SVE - yay! You do know how to use Git, right? No? try starting here.

Git authentication

HTTPS vs SSH? It's up to you but some argue that HTTPS is easy to get you going.

Whatever, you will need to authenticate the SVE (local machine) with Gitlab/GitHub. You can do this via HTTPS, entering your username and password in each session on the SVE (not a big deal)... or by using an RSA key. This RSA key should now be persistent on the SVE (it didn't used to be before the SVE upgrade).

RStudio in SVE

Packages

See note above re persistence.

If you need to add new packages use the install.packages() function. This seems to be able to bypass a permissons issue in C:/Apps/RLibraries which causes the normal the RStudio GUI/tab method to fail.

Better yet use the loadPackages() function developed at SERG :-)

Even better, consider using the renv package.

Using Git within RStudio

We recommend storing your local (working) project repositories within your Documents folder on the university filestore as storing Git repositories within cloud-synced folders may cause problems.

Git does seem to have some weird behaviour on the SVE to be aware of ... the correct operation of Git witin RStudio on the University network requires some careful working practices with respect to file paths.

Using the University filestore for project (working) files requires use of the mapped file path filestore (H:) not the Documents shortcut in the Quick access group of Windows Explorer.

While these two paths refer to the same physical location for your documents folder, they are resolved differently i.e. H:\ vs \\filestore.soton.ac.uk\users\xxmyusernamexx\mydocuments. When a project is started in RStudio from the latter location, the Git repository is not recognised correctly. As a result, the Git tab will be missing from the Environment pane.

Loading a project from Documents in Quick access group, the figure shows no Git tab and thus no access to Git processes thru the RStudio IDE:

Loading project from the same folder via H (mapped drive), figure shows the Git tab is now present and Git commands now accessible:

This problem seems to be limited to the Environment pane within the RStudio IDE as running Git commands through the Terminal (Console pane) pick up the repository correctly (as shown in image below).

So using Git through the Terminal is unaffected by the path used to open the project.