Other Resources for Positron Pro

In addition to the resources on this site, you may find these helpful:

Positron feature preview tips

Positron Pro sessions are available as a preview feature on Posit Workbench as of its 2024.12.0 release. The following sections highlight a few ways to have the best possible experience during this preview period.

If you run into any other issues, please reach out to the Positron team through Feedback and Issues.

Avoid slow R package installation

Posit Workbench runs on Linux, but CRAN doesn’t build Linux binaries for R packages. You can install R packages using the default configuration, but it’s likely that the process is extremely slow. Instead, consider using a CRAN-like repository that provides binaries for your Linux architecture, such as Posit Package Manager and set that via options() in R.

The example in this section assumes that your Workbench is installed on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy). The repository URL should be replaced with the appropriate URL for the platform your Workbench is installed on. To look up the repository URL from Posit Package Manager, use the Set up your environment to install R packages from CRAN tool.

For example, to set options for the current R session, run the following R code in your Positron Pro session:

options(repos = c(CRAN = "https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/__linux__/jammy/latest"))

To apply this change to all of your R sessions, add the above code to the .Rprofile in your home directory on Workbench.

Follow the Provide a way to set the default CRAN repositories issue on Github to learn about our plans for a better solution in the long term.

Ensure your Python installation is discovered

We plan to add administrator configuration to set defaults for both Python and R interpreters, as well as to control interpreter discovery. In the meantime, we suggest adding Python interpreters appropriate for use in Workbench to the PATH to ensure Positron can find and use those Python interpreters. See Configuring the Default Version of Python for instructions on how to do this.

Follow the Provide inclusion/exclusion of language runtimes issue on Github to learn about our plans for a better solution in the long term.

Allocate sufficient memory for your Positron Pro session

If your administrator has configured resource profiles on Posit Workbench, you should allocate at least 4 GB of RAM when starting Positron Pro sessions. We expect to make performance improvements in the future to decrease the memory needs of Positron.

Follow the Investigate high memory usage issue on GitHub to learn about our plans for a better solution in the long term.

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