Binder won't launch for R >= 4.0.0

[frederic-santos]

Describe the bug
Not sure if this is really a bug or something I did not understand well. However, when taking the rrtools repo "as is" and just changing all occurrences of R 3.6.0 by any member of the R 4.0.x family (in particular in the binder configuration), I cannot launch binder properly. Instead, the docker image is pulled and seems to build normally, but after a while I just get:
500 : Internal Server Error. The error was: could not start rstudio in time
and Rstudio server is not displayed within my browser.

To Reproduce

• An example here: https://github.com/frederic-santos/rrtools
• The bug report was also made here quite a long time ago: Binder won't launch with rocker/binder >= 4.0.0 karthik/binder-test#8

I understand that, if this is really a bug, this would be better to file this issue into the rocker repository, but I just wanted to know whether someone else has already faced the same issue.

Thanks!

[benmarwick]

Thank you, yes I have also noticed this. I'm not sure there's much we can do about it here in the rrtools repository. Do you have any suggestions?

[frederic-santos]

Thanks!
First I can forward this issue to Dirk Eddelbuettel to check the "rocker" side, and I will keep you informed of his answer.

[benmarwick]

I made a work-around by having use_readme_rmd generate a runtime.txt file, following the example here https://github.com/binder-examples/r. Please try it and let me know how you go!