This is a general PSA because I’ve seen a few different JupyterHub deployments get burned by this recently. The goal of this post is just to tie together a few issues, provide cross-links, and maybe help point folks in the right direction.
The rsession proxy project is what makes it possible for people to run RStudio on a JupyterHub. This is used by JupyterHub and Binder.
The problem with updating RStudio
However, the latest version of RStudio introduced a bug that that breaks the redirection, as documented in this issue:
and discussed re: Binder here:
This bug is documented in this RStudio issue:
but thus far it seems like it won’t be a priority for them to fix for some time.
The problem with updating R 4.1
If you pin RStudio to 4.0, and continue updating the base R version, you’ll get an error about visualizations not working in RStudio and the visualizations won’t work. See this issue for one example of this problem:
What to do
Right now, there is no workaround that I know of for getting RStudio 4.1 to work on JupyterHub until [rserver auth redirect doesn't use www root path when X-Forwarded-Proto is set · Issue #8888 · rstudio/rstudio · GitHub] is resolved.
Your best bet is to pin R to v 4.0, that way an old version of RStudio works properly.
This issue discusses this in some detail, but it’s unclear to me what is the right path forward there: Pinning R 4.0 with runtime.txt on mybinder.org not working as expected · Issue #1077 · jupyterhub/repo2docker · GitHub
Do you know any other workarounds?
I know that’s not ideal - if anybody knows of another workaround for either JupyterHub or Binder please do share! We should update this thread if there’s a better solution that comes up.