Google Compute Engine (GCE) lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. See the general Google documentation here.
Before you begin, you will need to set up a Cloud Platform project, and enable billing by adding a credit card.
A quickstart guide to using GCE is available here for making your first VM via the web interface, if you are not familiar with GCE then its best to start there.
Pricing is available here.
For googleComputeEngineR
you will need:
my-project-name
(NOT your project name)europe-west1-a
Service account key
json file, downloaded from the API Manager > Credentials > Create credentials > Service account key > Key type = JSONA video guide to setup and launching an RStudio server has been kindly created by Donal Phipps and is available at this link.
knitr::include_url("https://www.youtube.com/embed/1oM0NZbRhSI?rel=0")
Authentication requires you to set environment arguments with your setup details.
These can be set in an .Renviron
file located on your computer home directory - R will look in this file upon startup. Read more via ?Startup
The easiest way to find the right home directory is within RStudio, to click on the Home
button in RStudio's file explorer. Create a file via File > New file > Text File
, save and call it .Renviron
My .Renviron
file looks a bit like this:
GCE_AUTH_FILE="/Users/mark/xxxxx/auth.json" GCE_DEFAULT_PROJECT_ID="mark-xxxxxxx" GCE_DEFAULT_ZONE="europe-west1-a"
The GCE_AUTH_FILE
points to the file location of the service account JSON file taken from your Google Project. The other arguments set the default project and zone.
This file will then used for authentication when you load the library:
## GCE_AUTH_FILE set so auto-authentication > library(googleComputeEngineR) Successfully authenticated via /Users/mark/auth.json Set default project name to 'mark-xxxxx' Set default zone to 'europe-west1-a' > gce_get_project() $kind [1] "compute#project" $id [1] "43534234234324324" $creationTimestamp [1] "2015-05-08T15:22:38.416-07:00" $name [1] "mark-xxxxx" ...etc....
If you can't use an .Renviron
you can set environment files within the script via Sys.setenv
:
Sys.setenv("GCE_AUTH_FILE" = "/fullpath/to/auth.json")
Any scripts or data that you put into this service are public.
Add the following code to your website.
For more information on customizing the embed code, read Embedding Snippets.