Setting Up Rstudio Connect AWS EC2

Posit Professional products
1

I was looking to try out Rstudio Connect and do so on a virtual machine on AWS since we try to keep our infrastructure in the cloud as much as possible. I am able to get everything installed on the machine, SSH into it and am able to open the config file. However I am a bit confused on the correct way to setup the Address so it will work with all of the links, etc on the Connect instance. Does anyone have experience doing this?

2

Hello! Yes, I think this is a common use-case for Connect users.

Have you seen the Connect admin guide? There is a ton of useful information there to help you get started.

In particular, I think this section will be profitable for you:

The Server.Address property is the public URL used to access the server. When accessible over a non-standard port, this URL must specify both hostname and port. This setting enables Connect to include links in emails that send users to the appropriate location on the server.
...
Here is a sample configuration specifying both SenderEmail and Address.

[Server]
SenderEmail = rstudio-connect@company.com
Address = https://rstudio-connect.company.com/

You might want to be aware that if you do not set up an Elastic IP or a Route 53 URL or some other way of routing traffic to a consistent location that you might have to change this configuration when the box is reset (and the AWS URL ec2-... changes).

2 Likes
3

Yea thank you I see the guide, it just didnt give much in the way of examples (but then again I am sure others are more experienced in this area). Sounds like I should setup an Elastic IP and connect a URL to that, then I can just put that where it says Address and go on from there? Now that I type it seems less of a Connect thing and more of a basic IP/URL management from AWS I will search around for a good guide to go through that.

4

Yes, that's what I would probably do - set up an Elastic IP and then throw in a human-readable URL to that IP, and that is what you put in Address. This looks like it may be a good one:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-to-ec2-instance.html

5

Thank you that was helpful. Now I realize I can keep it on an elastic IP for now while I play with it and then if/when we want to set something up more for production we can make sure to get the name straightend out, do more security work and do it right. Appreciate the timely help!

1 Like