initctl: Unknown instance: error after Rstudio conf change

Question

I have a new version of R installed on an aws-machine (which always come with an old version for some reason and it's near impossible to just have yum or apt-get to work). I want rstudio to point to this new version which I've built from source without throwing the old version away. I therefore go to /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf (documentation) and change the contents to:

# Server Configuration File
rsession-which-r=/root/R-3.2.1/bin/R

I can confirm that at this location a new version of R is installed but then I get an error after rstudio-server restarts.

root@ip-172-31-40-49 rstudio]$ rstudio-server restart
initctl: Unknown instance:

What am I to do?

Answer 1

Below worked for me:

1) check the process that used 8787

sudo fuser 8787/tcp

2) with the -k option to kill all process.

sudo fuser -k 8787/tcp

3) Start RStudio Server

sudo rstudio-server start

The solution above is provided here by Leon Zhang.