We’re pleased to announce support for Kerberos in RStudio Connect: version 1.5.6. Organizations that use Kerberos can now run Shiny applications and Shiny R Markdown documents in tailored processes that have access only to the appropriate resources inside the organization.
The notable changes this release include:
Full support for Kerberos across Shiny applications and Shiny R Markdown documents by running R in an authenticated PAM session that uses the cached credentials of the current user. See the documentation for more details.
Content deployment no longer requires explicit publishing. New content is available immediately after it is deployed and visible only to the owner. Enable the [Applications].ExplicitPublishing setting to revert this behavior.
Heterogeneous server migrations are now supported, allowing administrators to upgrade their distribution or change to a different (supported) Linux distribution. See the migration documentation for more details.
Admins are now able to toggle the content filtering settings to enumerate all content on the server so that they can manage settings, regardless of whether or not they have visibility into that content. The permissions here are unchanged; the admin will only be able to view the settings for the content, not the content itself. To view the content, the admin would need to add themselves as a viewer or collaborator of the content, which is an audited action.
Shiny error sanitization is enabled by default. Disable the [Applications].ShinyErrorSanitization setting to revert this behavior. See the Shiny documentation for more information about Shiny error sanitization.
Improved LDAP group lookup performance on large LDAP servers that don’t support memberof. Additionally, improved LDAP logging and error handling.
Security enhancements around proxy authentication, redirects, and brute-force password attacks. This release adds support for a challenge-response (CAPTCHA) to help mitigate brute-force attacks on users’ passwords. Set [Authentication].ChallengeResponseEnabled to true to enable this feature.
Customize the subject prefix for all outgoing emails using the [Server].EmailSubjectPrefix setting. The default is still [RStudio Connect].
BREAKING: Running content as the current user is now disabled for content other than Shiny Applications or Shiny R Markdown Documents. Reports will execute as the application RunAs, falling back to the system Applications.RunAs if none is specified.
You can see the full release notes for RStudio Connect 1.5.6 here.
Upgrade Planning
There are no special precautions to be aware of when upgrading from v1.5.4. You can expect the installation and startup of v1.5.6 to be complete in under a minute.
If you’re upgrading from a release older than v1.5.4, be sure to consider the “Upgrade Planning” notes from those other releases, as well.
If you haven’t yet had a chance to download and try RStudio Connect we encourage you to do so. RStudio Connect is the best way to share all the work that you do in R (Shiny apps, R Markdown documents, plots, dashboards, Plumber APIs, etc.) with collaborators, colleagues, or customers.
You can find more details or download a 45 day evaluation of the product at https://www.rstudio.com/products/connect/. Additional resources can be found below.
RStudio Connect home page &amp; downloads
RStudio Connect Admin Guide
What IT needs to know about RStudio Connect
Detailed news and changes between each version
Pricing
An online preview of RStudio Connect