RStudio Server crash, restart requires project reopen to load packrat libs

[ras44]

In using RStudio Server with packrat, if the session crashes, a dialog box will pop up mentioning "The previous R session was abnormally terminated due to an unexpected crash. You may have lost workspace data as a result of this crash." ; however when it does restart, the packrat project libraries look like they are available, but they cannot be loaded with library(xyz). They are correctly available if I reopen the project (ie. .Rprofile can run source("packrat/inti.R")), and packrat can access the project libraries.

A reprex would be:

• create an R Project that uses packrat and install a library (say, "xyz") that is not available in the system or user libraries (ie. "xyz" would only be available via packrat)
• crash RStudio Server with .Call("abort")
• view the "The previous R session was abnormally terminated due to an unexpected crash. You may have lost workspace data as a result of this crash." dialog
• attempt to run library("xyz") and confirm that the package can't be loaded
• reopen the project and confirm that the package can be loaded with library("xyz")

It looks like the working directory is also the user's home directory after the crash. I'm not sure if that may be playing a role here.

[kevinushey]

What are the library paths after the restart? (What is the output of .libPaths()?)

I suspect that RStudio is perhaps overriding the library paths normally set by Packrat or something similar in this case.

[ras44]

The output of .libPaths() is:

[1] "/home/userid/project/packrat/lib/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu/3.5.0"    
[2] "/home/userid/project/packrat/lib-ext/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu/3.5.0"
[3] "/home/userid/project/packrat/lib-R/x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu/3.5.0"  

[kevinushey]

That's the output when you can't load the package? (I'm just surprised because my guess here is that the library paths are not being correctly restored after a crash, and so I would've expected different library paths)

[ras44]

That is weird. I was able to reproduce this error for one project until I called .libPaths() and produced that result. Now I cannot reproduce the error. I will try it with a fresh project to see if I can reproduce.

[ras44]

I have had that issue repeatedly over the past months, but after running .libPaths() once in one project, I'm unable to reproduce it in any of the projects it was happening in.

I do still run into one part of this issue: if I modify any file in the project's R directory after a crash-restart and then attempt to save the file, I get an error: "Error Saving File: No such file or directory". When I run getwd(), it returns the project's base directory.