Introduction
As a developer from a background with .NET and Microsoft tools, it comes as no surprise that I use Windows as my development platform. However, developing on Windows has never been better. The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) allows a developer to essentially to right at home with linux, arguably the best contemporary platform for developing.
As an R user, being able to develop on the linux platform and using RStudio IDE as a Windows users is a winning prospect. Fortunately, this has been made possible by RStudio and they wrote a lenthly blog post.
My blog post is just a brief outline of steps and references for getting RStudio server on WSL2.
Pre-requisites
This blog will assume the following as pre-requisites. Namely, WSL2, Ubuntu, and R have been installed successfully.
Installing RStudio
For a more lengthy outline of the following steps, I encourage the reader to follow Gary Ritchie’s blog post here.
Install RStudio Server is extremely straight forward as possible. Enter the following command in WSL2:
wget https://rstudio.org/download/latest/stable/server/bionic/rstudio-server-latest-amd64.deb sudo gdebi rstudio-server-latest-amd64.deb
Additionally, you can use the server itself by the accessing RStudio on your web browser at the url http://localhost:8787. You will need to enter in your your username and password that is used for the linux system on WSL.
Using RStudio server on WSL2
You can start the server with sudo rstudio-server start and stop with sudo rstudio-server stop. It is that simple.