Render rmarkdown from RStudio server to external drive

Question

When working locally, I use the following to render rmarkdown documents:

rmarkdown::render(input = rmd.temp , output_dir = out.dir, output_file = out.name)

This gets my template doc rmd.temp, then renders the document to out.dir and names the file out.name.

I am trying to replicate on a RStudio server. When out.dir is a local directory the code works fine. However, whenout.dir is a mapped directory to an external drive, I get the following error:

Error in replayPlot(x) : 
  could not open file'/...path..../figure-html/unnamed-chunk-2-1.png'

The link to the mapped drive works because I can use:

dir.create(out.dir)

and see the new folder appear. Any ideas why the rendering gets stuck?

Update

This is perhaps just a permission problem because I can't write a csv file either:

df <- data.frame(a=1:10)

setwd(out.dir)

write.csv(df, file = "df.csv")

Error in file(file, ifelse(append, "a", "w")) : 
  cannot open the connection

RStudio server is running on Ubuntu. I will open a new question on how to give RStudio folder permissions.

Answer 1

For anyone who has this problem, it can be fixed by adding this to the start of your script:

Sys.umask(mode="0000")

It was a permission problem. From the shell / command line, global permission was "0000" but from the RStudio console it was "0002", which produces -rw-r-- permissions for new files. The global permission can probably be changed for RStudio but this works.