Positron Pro Sessions

Workbench | Preview

Preview feature

This feature is in preview. Preview features are unsupported and may face breaking changes in a future release. Any issues found in the feature will be addressed during the regular release schedule; they will not result in immediate patches or hotfixes.

We encourage customers to try these features and we welcome any feedback via Posit Support, but we recommend that the feature not be used in production until it is in general availability (i.e., officially released as a full feature). To provide feedback, please email your Posit Customer Success representative or and specify that you are trialing this feature.

Overview

Posit Workbench allows you to launch Positron Pro sessions from the home page via the Job Launcher, if configured. In active Positron Pro sessions, users can work within the Positron IDE and remain within the administrative framework Posit Workbench provides, such as authentication, PAM session management, etc.

Requirements

The following must be configured correctly before Positron Pro sessions can be launched:

  • Job Launcher: See the Job Launcher section for configuration information.
  • SSL: See the SSL Configuration section for more configuration information.

Limitations

Supported Linux distributions:

  • RHEL 9
  • Ubuntu Linux 22 and 24

Getting started in preview

To make Positron Pro sessions available to users while the feature is in preview, you must follow the configuration steps below.

When the feature is no longer in preview in a future Workbench release, you might need to take additional steps to clean up and reconfigure your environments if you followed the configuration steps below during the preview period. The Upgrade Instructions section of the release notes will include any required and recommended configuration changes.

Enable Positron Pro sessions

To enable Positron Pro sessions, create a positron.conf file in /etc/rstudio with the following option set:

/etc/rstudio/positron.conf
enabled=1

Configure default user settings

Once Positron Pro sessions are released for general availability, Workbench will provide a default user settings file in positron-user-settings.json. In the meantime, please create this file and configure the file to contain at least the following settings:

/etc/rstudio/positron-user-settings.json
{
    "terminal.integrated.defaultProfile.linux": "bash",
    "extensions.autoUpdate": false,
    "extensions.autoCheckUpdates": false,
    "quarto.path": "/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/quarto/bin/quarto",
    "positron.environment.enabled": false,
    "python.interpreters.exclude": [
        "/usr/bin",
        "/bin",
    ],
    "python.environmentProviders.enable": {
        "Conda": false
    }
}

For other possible user setting configurations, see the Positron Pro User Settings section.

We also recommend reviewing the Interpreter Settings section and adding additional configurations to ensure users have access to the R and Python versions they need within their sessions.

Allocate sufficient memory for Positron Pro sessions

If you have configured resource profiles following the instructions at Setup resource profiles, you should allocate at a minimum 4 GB of RAM to each Positron Pro session.

For more information, see Other Resources for Positron Pro.

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