Setup RStudio and Shiny Servers on Digital Ocean

I use [Digital Ocean] a lot in my own research work when I need to run a big parallel computation job. But I’ve also used it when teaching R, as it’s a great way to spin up an RStudio server that students can log into and work on without having to set up their own development environments.

Setting up RStudio server on DO can be involved, but a large amount of that work can be done automatically with this cloud-config script I’ve written. Just paste it into the “User Data” section when starting a droplet on Ubuntu 14.04.

(N.B. that the R packages here probably require at least 1GB of RAM to compile, so the lowest you can go is the second-smallest DO instance.)