How to I bypass the login page on Rstudio?

Question

I am trying to bypass the login page on RStudio as we are running it in a Docker container and this step is not necessary as we authenticate before we let users launch the container.

I am using the Rocker implementation of RStudio for Docker. We are running on Centos7.

I'm fairly new to SO, so please let me know what information would be helpful for answering the question.

Answer 1

I figured it out.

When you start rserver, add the flag --auth-none=1, so my final CMD in my Dockerfile looked like:

USER rstudio
CMD ["/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/rserver","--server-daemonize=0","--auth-none=1"]

I will caution though, the first time I did it, I ran with sudo -E in front of the command and it logged into RStudio as ROOT! (this is also because I had altered the /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf with the setting auth-minimum-user-id=0 because I was trying to get the error to go away (which it did :)

The above code will change to user 'rstudio' before running the command which will log you straight in as rstudio.

Hope that helps someone out there, I know I spent the better portion of my day finding a work-around!

Answer 2

To bypass the login page you need also to define the environment variable USER.

need to set system environmental variable USER=rstudio in order for --auth-none 1

-- https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues/1663

Here is a snippet of Dockerfile permitting to run the RStudio server and to login as the user rstudio.

ENV USER="rstudio"

CMD ["/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/rserver", "--server-daemonize", "0", "--auth-none", "1"]

When it's run the login page is not displayed and we can check that the server and the session are running with the rstudio user.

# Run the container
docker run --name rstudio --rm -p 8787:8787 -d rstudio

# Check processes
docker exec -it rstudio ps aux 

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
rstudio+     1  0.1  0.3 210792 13844 ?        Ssl  21:10   0:00 /usr/lib/rstudi
rstudio     49  0.7  2.3 555096 82312 ?        Sl   21:10   0:03 /usr/lib/rstudi
root       570  0.0  0.1  45836  3744 pts/0    Rs+  21:18   0:00 ps aux