unable to start rstudio in centos getting error “unable to connect to service”

Question

I have Rstudio server installed on CentOS 6, but I cannot login to Rstudio from the browser at http://localhost:8787 in browser. A popup titled \"RStudio Initialization Erro

Answer 1

When you login the rserver process handles your authentication, and then fires up an rsession process, which is the session you will use. The problem occurs when the rsession process terminates due to an error.

If you have administrator privileges, you can debug the error by tracing the rserver process and looking at the problem that caused rsession to exit. Here is how to do it.

First find the rserver process-id.

ps auxw | grep studio
rstudio-server       7035  0.0  0.0 362488  4480 ?        Ssl  16:37   0:01 /usr/local/lib/rstudio-server/bin/rserver

Note the second number that appears on the output of a row containing the string rstudio-server/bin/rserver. In the case above the process-id is 7035.

Then trace rserver sending the output to a file. The number after -p should be the rserver process-id. The funky -e option is used to cut-down noise from Java's thread management.

sudo strace -f -e 'trace=!clock_gettime,gettimeofday,futex,timerfd_settime,epoll_wait,epoll_ctl' -p 7035 -o trace.txt

Login and wait for the error message to appear.

Stop the tracing by pressing ctrl-c.

Open the file with your favourite editor, and search for the string exit_group.

The lines above it are likely to indicate the error in rsession. In my case it was a symbolic link from .rstudio to a missing directory.

7529  mkdir("/home/dds/.rstudio", 0777) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
7529  stat("/home/dds/.rstudio", 0x7ffff37419b0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
7529  write(2, "07 Feb 2015 16:46:53 [rsession-d"..., 395) = 395
7529  sendto(3, "<11>Feb  7 16:46:53 rsession-dds"..., 398, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 398
7529  exit_group(1)