RStudio should be shut down on container exit

[cboettig]

Bug description

When a student leaves a session idle (e.g. at the end of a class lab session etc), datahub shuts down the instance (naturally). However, it seems that it does not first shutdown the running RStudio session. When the student logs back in, RStudio reports that:

The previous R session was abnormally terminated due to an unexpected crash. You may have lost work as a result.

This warning would be scary but mostly harmless. However, if the student is using an active "Project" in RStudio, RStudio also closes the current open project (presumably as precaution, since restoring the previous state in the event of a real crash could create a vicious cycle). Students may not notice their most recent project is no longer active, until they look for a git menu or such.

For comparison, in the rocker project, the RStudio instance is run by an init service (s6), which handles a shutdown of the service on container exit: https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker-versioned2/blob/master/scripts/install_rstudio.sh#L108-L110

Thanks

Environment & setup

RStudio on r.datahub.berkeley.edu

How to reproduce

1. Launch RStudio instance on r.datahub.berkeley.edu
2. Create a project in the New Project menu
3. Walk away and wait for kubernetes to kill the server
4. Log back in

[felder]

There has been some discussion previously about having rstudio shutdown more gracefully. This is probably something the datahub service team should discuss and add to the feature enhancement roadmap.

[balajialg]

@cboettig Thanks for making the enhancement request! To understand the severity of the student impact and scope this request accordingly in our backlog, Can you answer the below questions,

• How many students are affected by this issue? How severe is the impact?

• Are there existing alternatives that they are using to avoid this scenario?

@ryanlovett Is this a request that could be scoped this month (from a feasibility standpoint)

[cboettig]

Sure!

• every student is affected (54 students)
• It's easy enough to work around; students know to dismiss the warning and log back into their project.

[balajialg]

Thanks, @cboettig! A similar issue is already part of our backlog (more from a documentation perspective)

[yuvipanda]

With #2908 and #2905 I think tini is now on all the hubs. This should reduce instances of RStudio state corruption, and hopefully help #2891 and #2819

[yuvipanda]

@cboettig ok, can you re-open this if you encounter that error again?

[cboettig]

@yuvipanda launched a session at r.datahub.berkeley.edu this morning, switched into an active project, and then just closed the tab. Returning to it this afternoon, the session restarts and again displays the "The previous R session was abnormally terminated ...." message.

Doesn't look like I have permissions to reopen the issue though.

[ryanlovett]

Apparently the warning is enabled when the "abend" session setting is set in ~/.rstudio/sessions/active/*/session-persistent-state, https://community.rstudio.com/t/restarting-rstudio-server-in-docker-avoid-error-message/10349/2. The warning can reportedly be squelched by changing the session setting, though I agree it'd be best to close RStudio properly.

See rstudio_abend for example.

[cboettig]

@ryanlovett thanks! Note that the other side-effect of closing RStudio improperly which is more of a nuisance than the warning itself is the fact that RStudio exits the currently active project (if any), though it keeps open the active file. This means the user often does not immediately realize they are no longer working inside the correct project (i.e. git repo) until later.

(RStudio presumably exits the active project in case it was responsible for the crash; thereby allowing the user to get back into RStudio without getting into an endless crash loop; so that much makes sense. I do think RStudio's crash message would be better if it mentioned this behavior though, or at least also closed the active documents).