[SOLVED] Databricks: configure R to use custom CRAN mirror by default

Databricks: configure R to use custom CRAN mirror by default

I want to specify a default custom CRAN mirror in R under Databricks, but adjusting the config in the Rprofile.site file seems not to bet recognized at all.

I have already read the official Microsoft documentation on how to customize the R session in Databricks:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/databricks/sparkr/#r-session-customization
The value of R_HOME is /usr/lib/R

So, I have adjusted my Databricks cluster-scoped init script which adds following lines to the /usr/lib/R/etc/Rprofile.site file:

local({
  options(repos = c(CRAN = "<my_custom_cran_url>"))
})

This works perfectly fine. However if I run getOption("repos") within an R Notebook I get following output:

                         Cloud                           MRAN 
"https://cloud.r-project.org/"  "https://cran.microsoft.com/"

These are still the initial default CRAN settings. This means, that they weren't overwritten by my custom CRAN URL in the Rprofile.site file.

If I run the lines mentioned above (local({...repos...})) in an R Notebook, the getOption("repos") will output the desired entry of:

                CRAN 
"<my_custom_cran_url>"

Maybe the file /usr/lib/R/etc/Rprofile.site is not executed at all although Microsoft is saying so? Does anyone have a suggestion?

The Databricks Runtime version: 12.2 LTS (includes Apache Spark 3.3.2, Scala 2.12)

Solution

This issue is fixed in DBR 15

#'_CleanRShell*.r'
     # Split the environment variable by ',' (changed from ':' to ',' in DBR 15.0 to support the
  # user:password@host.com format for private repos)
  options(
    repos = strsplit(
      Sys.getenv("DATABRICKS_DEFAULT_R_REPOS"), ","
    )[[1]]