Installing RStudio on Termux

Running RStudio on Android Tablets isn't too difficult.

Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm doing. I am just documenting what worked for me, in case it helps anyone else.

1. Update your packages

This will make sure we get up-to-date packages.

pkg update & pkg upgrade -y

2. Install Ubuntu

The utility proot-distro allows us to quickly install linux distros.

Note: You may have to install it's dependencies first.

pkg install proot-distro

We want to install Ubuntu, other distros might work as well but I haven't tried them.

proot-distro install ubuntu

3. Install RStudio

Start a Ubuntu shell.

proot-distro login ubuntu

This rest mostly follows what's written here.

VERS='2023.09.0-445'
apt update && apt upgrade -y && apt install -y wget
apt install r-base r-base-dev -y
apt install gdebi-core
wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/rstudio-ide-build/server/jammy/arm64/rstudio-server-${VERS}-arm64.deb
gdebi rstudio-server-${VERS}-arm64.deb

If the installation succeeded you should be able to start the server and reach it at localhost:8787.

rstudio-server start

4. Configure the Server

I didn't want user authentication since I'ld only be using it on my local device, so I added

auth-none=1
auth-minimum-user-id=0

to /etc/rstudio/rserver.conf and restarted the server.

rstudio-server restart