Summary of Posit Package Manager Installation

Installation Planning

Now that you have been through all the steps required to install and configure Posit Package Manager, this section summarizes what you have learned and things to consider as you prepare to install it on your own infrastructure. This section reviews the questions raised during the labs to help you plan your Package Manager installation.

System Requirements

Review the System Requirements for Posit Package Manager and consider these questions:

Are these requirements acceptable?
Do you anticipate any issues with meeting these requirements, particularly the disk space, which is the dominant resource for Package Manager?
What type of architecture will you be using (single server, load-balanced cluster, or Kubernetes), and does your license tier support it?

Repositories and Sources

Package Manager is your package repository, so planning revolves around which packages you will serve and how:

Which package ecosystems do your users need: R (CRAN), Bioconductor, Python (PyPI), and/or VS Code extensions (Open VSX)?
Will your instance have outbound access to the Posit Package Service, access it through an outbound proxy, or does it need to run fully air-gapped? Air-gapped environments require significantly more storage because all data is downloaded up front.
Which repositories will you create, and which sources will each one subscribe to?
Do your teams develop internal packages that you will distribute through Package Manager (for example, from Git)?
Do you need reproducibility through frozen, time-stamped repository URLs (for example, to integrate with renv)?

Governance: Security and Licensing

Does your security team require blocking packages by known vulnerability severity, by license, or by name?
Which package licenses are acceptable in your organization, and which should be blocked?
Will you need to make exceptions to allow specific packages or sources?

Security, Certificates, and Authentication

Will you need to get security approvals?
Do you know where you will get the SSL/TLS certificates you will need?
Is the full certificate chain included in your certificate file?
Is the private key for your certificate free of a passphrase, as Package Manager requires?
Will you restrict any repositories to specific users with authenticated repositories and API tokens? If so, do you know where you will be able to get the information you need to integrate your authentication system with Posit Package Manager? (e.g., Client URL, ID, and Secret for OIDC).

Before You Move On

When planning a Posit Package Manager installation, we highly recommend setting up an Architecture Review with a Posit Solutions Engineer. An Architecture Review will ensure you understand the requirements for your target architecture. You will also receive a custom installation guide to help you during the installation process.

This material attempts to stay aligned with information typically covered in an Architecture Review, but should not be considered a replacement. To schedule a call, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Posit Package Manager files on the system

As an Administrator of Posit Package Manager, it is helpful to understand where the different files are located in the file system. Package Manager places files in a few main directories:

/etc for configuration files
/opt for the Package Manager binaries
/var/lib for application data (the database and cached packages)
/var/log for log files

Unlike Workbench and Connect, Package Manager does not need R, Python, or Quarto runtimes. R and/or Python are only required if you use Git sources to build internal packages, in which case you install them separately.

This diagram shows the types of file located in each of these directories:

.
├── etc
│   └── rstudio-pm # Package Manager configuration files
│       ├── rstudio-pm.gcfg          # Main configuration file
│       └── rstudio-pm.gcfg.defaults # Example config with default values
├── opt
│   └── rstudio-pm
│       ├── bin
│       │   ├── rstudio-pm     # The Package Manager service binary
│       │   ├── rspm           # The admin command-line interface
│       │   └── license-manager
│       └── VERSION            # The installed Package Manager version
└── var
    ├── lib
    │   └── rstudio-pm # Package Manager application data (Server.DataDir)
    │       ├── db                       # Internal database (SQLite by default)
    │       ├── <license-file>.lic       # License file activation
    │       └── ...                      # Cached source and binary packages
    └── log
        └── rstudio
            └── rstudio-pm # Package Manager log files
                ├── rstudio-pm.log         # Main server log
                ├── rstudio-pm.access.log  # HTTP access log (optional)
                ├── rstudio-pm.service.log # Package service log (optional)
                └── rstudio-pm.audit.log   # Audit log (optional)

Cheatsheet

Managing Package Manager

Terminal

# Check Package Manager version
/opt/rstudio-pm/bin/rspm --version
# or read the version file
cat /opt/rstudio-pm/VERSION

# Edit configuration file
sudo nano /etc/rstudio-pm/rstudio-pm.gcfg

Service Management

Terminal

sudo systemctl status rstudio-pm
sudo systemctl restart rstudio-pm
sudo systemctl start rstudio-pm
sudo systemctl stop rstudio-pm

License Management

Terminal

# Check license status
sudo /opt/rstudio-pm/bin/license-manager status

# Activate a license file: set ownership and permissions for the
# rstudio-pm service user, copy it into the data directory, then restart
sudo chown rstudio-pm <license-file>.lic
sudo chmod 0600 <license-file>.lic
sudo cp -a <license-file>.lic /var/lib/rstudio-pm/
sudo systemctl restart rstudio-pm

Troubleshooting

If an issue is occurring that does not seem to be specific to a particular package or repository, then there could be an issue related to the configuration of the Package Manager server or with the Package Manager software. These types of issues can often be resolved by searching the Package Manager Administrator guide, however, if there are still questions the next step is to contact Posit Support.

Support Agreement

By purchasing Posit software you have access to Posit Support, which is outlined in our Support Agreement.

Filing a support ticket

You have access to an automated ticket and reporting service through which support requests are logged and ticket ID(s) issued within thirty minutes. For more information about submitting a support ticket review the instructions in the Open a support ticket section of the Posit Documentation.

When troubleshooting, the support team will often ask for your Package Manager logs (see Logging) and the output of:

Terminal

sudo /opt/rstudio-pm/bin/license-manager status