RStudio Connect 1.8.6 – Administrator Digest

This article is originally published at https://blog.rstudio.com/

Security & Authentication

LDAP / Active Directory Changes

Group handling within RStudio Connect has significantly improved for LDAP / Active Directory within this release. Groups will now be synchronized via a background process on a scheduled interval. The group membership for a user is determined on login rather than at the time of content access, and permission checks will use synced data from the RStudio Connect database rather than making LDAP requests.

LDAP Groups can be automatically populated upon user login if the LDAP.GroupsAutoProvision configuration option is enabled. This option is disabled by default to prevent an unexpectedly large number of groups from being pulled in unexpectedly. If the number of groups is not a concern, enabling this option is recommended for the optimal user experience.

As a result of these changes, RStudio Connect will support session$groups (via the HTTP header Shiny-Server-Credentials) in Shiny apps when using LDAP or Active Directory. Groups are listed by name according to the setting LDAP.GroupNameAttribute. LDAP groups are also available to other content types via the HTTP header RStudio-Connect-Credentials.

Groups Page Update

The Groups page will now be available in the RStudio Connect dashboard under the “People” tab for all authentication types except those that return Unique IDs instead of group names. Using the Groups page, authorized users can add, remove, and rename groups when necessary. The Groups page can also be used to inspect groups for their user membership lists and perform group searches.

Deprecations & Breaking Changes

• Breaking Change The Applications.TempMounting configuration flag has been removed. Previously, disabling the flag would permit R processes to inspect the temporary data of other R processes.
• Breaking Change When using Postgres, RStudio Connect verifies that a minimum version of 9.5 is used.
• Breaking Change GroupsByUniqueId and GroupsAutoProvision cannot be enabled at the same time. IDs received from the authentication provider are not immediately useful for users when group auto provisioning is enabled. Please see this section of the Admin Guide for more information.
• Deprecation The Server.SourcePackageDirsetting is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Administrators should consider migrating to RStudio Package Manager or set up a private package repository. Please review this section of the Admin Guide for instructions.

• Deprecation The following Groups management settings have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release:

  • LDAP.GroupsAutoRemoval
  • OAuth2.GroupsAutoRemoval
  • Proxy.GroupsAutoRemoval
  • SAML.GroupsAutoRemoval

Please review the full release notes.

Upgrade Planning

Upgrade Notes for LDAP / Active Directory Authentication

In RStudio Connect 1.8.6, LDAP user groups are determined on login, and group information is synced from the LDAP server to the Connect database in configured intervals.

What to expect when upgrading to the new LDAP Sync process:

• RStudio Connect enters “upgrade mode”
• All LDAP users start without any group memberships
• Users are divided into batches sized according to the total number of users
• RStudio Connect will attempt to obtain group memberships for all batches within the configured update interval (default 4 hours), making the best effort to not disrupt users’ normal usage of the system
• Once all users are synced, RStudio Connect enters regular operation where users are updated throughout a configured interval (default 4 hours)

In some cases, administrators may need to increase the update interval to be longer than 4 hours so that updates can be more spread out throughout the day.

Learn more about the changes and upgrades in the updated Admin Guide.

Upgrade RStudio Connect

To perform an upgrade, download and run the installation script. The script installs a new version of RStudio Connect on top of the earlier one. Existing configuration settings are respected. Additional documentation can be found here.

# Download the installation script
curl -Lo rsc-installer.sh https://cdn.rstudio.com/connect/installer/installer-v1.5.1.sh

# Run the installation script
sudo bash ./rsc-installer.sh 1.8.6

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