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Setting up your own online mirror using CRAN

Here is a way to set up a mirror on a Linux machine using the following ingredients:

  • Ubuntu
  • nginx
  • R
  • crontab

This method delivers the current stable version of the app. Alternative methods include:

  1. GitHub provides the most up to date development version.

  2. Docker containers provide the most secure way to install an IsoplotR mirror.

Instructions for offline use are provided in the main README file.

Install R and nginx, if required

If these packages are not installed on your system already, then you can add them with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install nginx r-base r-base-dev

Equivalent instructions for CentOS can be found here.

Create a user to run IsoplotR

It can be advantageous to have a non-human user running the applications such as IsoplotR that you are exposing over the web so as to limit any damage should one behave badly. For our purposes we will create one called wwwrunner:

sudo useradd -mr wwwrunner

Set up IsoplotRgui for this user

The version of IsoplotR and IsoplotRgui that gets run will be the version that our new user wwwrunner has installed.

Install IsoplotR for this user:

sudo -Hu wwwrunner sh -c "mkdir ~/R"
sudo -Hu wwwrunner sh -c "echo R_LIBS_USER=~/R > ~/.Renviron"
sudo -Hiu wwwrunner Rscript -e \
     "utils::install.packages(pkgs='IsoplotRgui',lib='~/R',repos='https://cloud.r-project.org/')"

Create a systemd service for IsoplotR

Copy following into a new file /etc/systemd/system/isoplotr.service:

[Unit]
Description=IsoplotR
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=wwwrunner
ExecStart=/usr/bin/Rscript -e IsoplotRgui::daemon(3839)
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note we are setting User=wwwrunner to use our new user and we are running it on port 3839.

Then to make IsoplotR start on system boot type:

sudo systemctl enable isoplotr

Of course you can use other systemctl commands such as start, stop and restart (to control whether it is running), and disable (to stop it from running automatically on boot).

You can view the logs from this process at any time using:

sudo journalctl -u isoplotr

(more information below).

Expose IsoplotR with nginx

Ubuntu encourages you to put your configuration files in the directory /etc/nginx/sites-enabled. If this directory is present (and to be sure, you can check for a line saying include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; in the file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf) then you need to add a file called /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default with the following contents:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    root /var/www/html;

    index index.html;

    server_name _;

    location /isoplotr/ {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3839/;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
    }
}

If you already have a file called /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default, you will need to copy just the location {...} block into the appropriate server {...} block in the existing file.

Restart nginx

If you need to start isoplotr now, call:

sudo systemctl start isoplotr

You can restart nginx to take the changes to its configuration we made above with:

sudo systemctl restart nginx

and IsoplotR will be available on http://localhost/isoplotr

You should now be able to browse to [http://localhost/isoplotr]. Once you have configured your firewall you should be able to browse to /isoplotr on your machine from another machine.

Set up auto-updating

To ensure that IsoplotR is up-to-date, it is a good idea to set up auto-updating.

Put the following in a script /usr/local/sbin/updateIsoplotR.sh:

sudo -Hiu wwwrunner Rscript -e \
     "utils::update.packages(lib.loc='~/R',ask=FALSE,repos='https://cloud.r-project.org')"
systemctl restart isoplotr

Ensure that it is executable with:

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/sbin/updateIsoplotR.sh

One way to ensure that this script is regularly run is with crontab. First enter sudo crontab -e at the command prompt and then enter:

# Minute    Hour   Day of Month    Month            Day of Week           Command
# (0-59)   (0-23)    (1-31)    (1-12 or Jan-Dec) (0-6 or Sun-Sat)
    0        0         *             *                  0        /usr/local/sbin/updateIsoplotR.sh | /usr/bin/logger

which will automatically synchronise IsoplotR and IsoplotRgui with CRAN on every Sunday.

You can force an update yourself by running the script as the root user:

sudo /usr/local/sbin/updateIsoplotR.sh

Maintenance

You can view the logs from the various processes mentioned here as follows:

Process command for accessing logs
cron (including the update script) journalctl -eu cron
systemD journalctl -e _PID=1
IsoplotRgui journalctl -eu isoplotr
nginx journalctl -eu nginx
nginx detail logs are written into the /var/log/nginx directory

journalctl has many interesting options; for example -r to see the most recent messages first, -k to see messages only from this boot, or -f to show messages as they come in. The -e option we have been using scrolls to the end of the log so that you are looking at the most recent entries immediately.

If you need to set a custom timeout (say, to 6.5 seconds in this example), change the ExecStart line in isoplotr.service like this:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/Rscript -e IsoplotRgui::daemon(3839, timeout=6.5)