Category: Amazon Lightsail

Installing the data.table package on Amazon Linux – LEMRS v0.6

This week I’ve upgraded the server to LEMRS v0.6, which adds three R packages for meta-analysis, esc, metafor, and robumeta.

The esc package requires another, much larger R package called data.table. That package, however, wouldn’t install. Like many R packages, data.table required the installation to do an automatic compilation of code written in C, but the C compiler couldn’t find some of the files it needed. This is because Amazon Linux uses non-standard folder locations for many of those files.

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LEMRS v0.5 – Adding rvest and aws.signature

I’ve been having problems with the web version of the Open-Meta app crashing with a C stack usage error. I entered an issue on the Shiny Server Github page and with the help of others who have had this problem, now suspect that the error is caused by the rJava package, which is required by mailR, the package I’ve been using to send email.

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Let’s put the whole Tidyverse on Amazon Lightsail (LEMRS v0.3)

The Tidyverse is a collection of related R packages, many of which I use on Open-Meta. I recently added the entire Tidyverse to my Windows-based development system, which meant I had to do the same to move that code to my Amazon Lightsail instance, which I did yesterday.

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Adding RStudio to an Amazon Lightsail Instance

Today I decided to try adding the RStudio Server to my Amazon Lightsail instance. There are three steps to this – downloading and installing the software, opening up port 8787, and adding a user with a password who can log in to the server.

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Installing and configuring a database engine like MySQL or MariaDB on Amazon Lightsail

So many choices! In previous blogs I’ve talked about the traditional LAMP stack, in which the “M” stands for the open-source MySQL database engine. I barely understand the details, but somehow Oracle now owns MySQL. There’s still a free open-source version, often referred to as the community edition. Some open-source developers weren’t happy about the Oracle switch, however, and “forked” the MySQL code into a new project called MariaDB.

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How to connect to Amazon Lightsail with PuTTY, FileZilla, WinSCP, and HeidiSQL

Connections from your own computer to your instance on Amazon Lightsail are made using SSH keys rather than passwords. Here are some tips for setting up connections between some useful Windows programs and your instance.

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How to send email from R with the help of Amazon SES and mailR

Now we have a LEMRS stack. How about adding email? Amazon’s Simple Email Service seems anything but simple when you confront its voluminous documentation, so here’s a tl;dr version for a relatively simple set-up with R. One of the big attractions here is that if you’re already running an Amazon instance, you can send thousands of emails every month at no additional cost. Otherwise, it’s 10 cents per thousand emails. You may find it worthwhile to sign up for Amazon Web Services just for the ability to send email.

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How to configure nginx and shiny-server for a LEMRS stack

My last post included an Amazon Lightsail launch script to set up an instance with a LEMRS (Linux / EngineX (nginx) / MySQL / R / Shiny-Server) stack. This time we’re going transfer files into the instance, including new configuration files for nginx and shiny-server, start both of them up, and see how they work.

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