Sometimes it can be convenient to run RStudio remotely from an iPad or another machine with little RAM or disk space. This can be done quite easily using the free RStudio Server on OSX via docker. To do this:

• Find the rocker/rstudio image on docker hub and follow the setup steps here at github.

• Once the image is running, you should be able to connect with Safari on the host Mac to the login page eg at

While the setup from the previous posts works for the hadoop shell commands, you will still fail to access the remote cluster from GUI programs (eg RStudio) and/or with hadoop plugins like RHadoop.

There are two reasons for that:

• GUI programs do not inherit your terminal/shell enviroment variables - unless you start them from a terminal session with

 $ open /Applications/RStudio.app

• $HADOOP_OPTS / $YARN_OPTS are not evaluated by other programs even if the variables are present in their execution environment.

The first problem is well covered by various blog posts. The main difficulty is only to find the correct procedure for your OSX version,since Apple has changed several times over the years: