[R-SIG-Mac] [R-SIG Question] Starting R on System Startup

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi Brendan,

On Nov 21, 2008, at 11:42 AM, brendan veeneman wrote:

>
> Hi R people,
>
>
> I have a Mac OSX server (it's basically a very fast desktop) running  
> R that I'd like to set to run automatically on system reboots.  I  
> tried using the system startup items as I had with other  
> applications, but for whatever reason R wouldn't take.   
> Interestingly, it sent the standard booting information ("Welcome to  
> R",etc) to the system console, though by the time I could check the  
> process list it was never running.

Out of curiosity, by "system startup items" do you mean the System  
Preferences > Accounts > YOU > Login Items, or something else?

> Do any of you administrate R on OSX?  I've heard some things about a  
> new mac startup interface called launchd - does this work for R?  I  
> know StartupItems is deprecated but I figured I'd check if it was  
> possible in launchd before trying it.  I've searched online for this  
> information for a couple weeks but couldn't find it (for some  
> reason, googling the letter R and the word startup or boot wasn't  
> very fruitful), so I turn to you.  If the answer to this question is  
> RTFM, I don't know where to access that information, so help pages  
> would definitely be appreciated too.
>
> As a corollary to this, I should also be able to require and run  
> Rserve from the R startup files too, right?

I'm not exactly sure what's going south with your setup, but have you  
stumbled on Lingon?:
http://tuppis.com/lingon/

It's a GUI for creating/editing launchd config files. I haven't  
actually tried it, but it looks pretty self explanatory and might  
help. You have several options to choose from when making your new  
launchd config, but I suspect you can best decide what options are best.

HTH,
-steve