Disabling Features in the RStudio IDE

If you are a system administrator looking to control what actions your users can perform through the RStudio IDE it is possible to disable selected features of RStudio by defining certain environmental variables on your system. These include:

RSTUDIO_DISABLE_EXTERNAL_PUBLISH

This option disables publishing to ShinyApps and RPubs, so your users will not be able to publish documents or applications to these external sites.

RSTUDIO_DISABLE_PUBLISH

This option disables all publishing.

RSTUDIO_DISABLE_PACKAGES

This option disables the packages pane entirely. This is meant only for sites that have performance issues due to having too many packages available in global libraries (for example, installing all CRAN packages in a global library). Note that users will still be able to install and load packages via the Console.

RSTUDIO_DISABLE_CHECK_FOR_UPDATES

This option disables the “Check for Updates” feature. We recommend against activating this as you will no longer receive important updates for RStudio which may include security or other critical fixes.

Setting these environment variables to any value will disable the corresponding feature. You can set them on a per-user basis by defining them to the user’s ~/.Rprofile file or globally by defining them within R by adding the environment variable to the Renviron.site file that is part of the R installation. This file is located at R_HOME/etc/Renviron.site as described here: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/base/html/Startup.html

For example:

Renviron.site
RSTUDIO_DISABLE_EXTERNAL_PUBLISH=1

In addition to these, RStudio Workbench (previously RStudio Server Pro) has the capabilities to disable other features. Check out the RStudio Workbench Administrator's Guide Appendix D for more information.