Upcoming Project and Home Directory Changes for RStudio Cloud

There are upcoming changes to the structure of RStudio Cloud projects that will be applied on April 11, 2018. RStudio Cloud expects users to store files in two separate locations, serving different purposes:

Directory Name Current Location Intended Usage
Project /home/rstudio-user/project To store all project files (e.g. R source files, data files) that should be shared with other users who have access to this project.
Home /home/rstudio-user To store all secrets (e.g. git details, database passwords, keys, etc.) that are associated with the project or user and you don’t want shared with others users.

Today, all files in all locations above are copied when a project is copied. To better differentiate between the Project and Home directories, we are making the following changes:

  1. New and existing projects: the Project directory will be moved from /home/rstudio-user/project to /cloud/project.
  2. New projects only: the contents of the Home directory for projects created after this date will no longer be included when a project is copied.
    Note: the R user library (/home/rstudio-user/R) is unaffected by this change and will continue to be copied.

What do I need to do?

For existing projects: To mitigate this:

  1. Move any files that are part of the project from the Home to the Project directory. This will ensure that these files will be included when projects are copied.
  2. Change any absolute paths to relative paths. Absolute references to to files in the Project directory will break after this change.

For new projects: if you typically store or reference files located in the Home directory and you expect other users to access those files, you must place those files in the Project directory.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about this change.

Thank you,
The RStudio Cloud Team

I'm probably misunderstanding what you are saying about the Home directory but is sounds like you are saying that things like passwords, keys and other similar information will be stored in the clear there. Is that the case?

I'm not an RStudio Cloud user yet but that Intended Usage kinda' raised the security hairs on my neck:grinning:

Thanks for the reply. I can see the possible confusion. We would not recommend storing passwords, ssh keys, and other secrets in the clear in your home directory.

There are R packages and system utilities (like git) that end up storing user specific data in the home directory. The goal behind the change is to prevent that information from being inadvertently copied when another user copies one of your projects.