RStudio, an IDE for R, has made tons of improvements over the past 5 years and one of them is the ability to run non-R code (including the output from said non-R code) inline, within an RMarkdown document. In light of this functionality, today’s post will run through an example of how to run JavaScript - specifically, d3.js, a JS library for “manipulating documents based on data” - within RStudio using the library r2d3.

In today’s post I am going to go through the steps needed to get RStudio up-and-running in the cloud using Amazon’s free-tier EC2 services, Docker, and rocker/tidyverse (free-tier setups can still result in expenses so please read the documentation carefully!). If you’ve never done anything with AWS before, the first thing you’ll need to do is create and activate an AWS account. After that, as long as you’ve got RStudio, Git BASH, and a Win 10 PC, the remainder of the instructions should work without issue.