Remote SSH: HTML widget in R doesn't work

[ZhimingYe]

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.01.0 (Universal) build 159
Code - OSS Version: 1.95.0
Commit: bc8820b
Date: 2025-01-09T23:29:00.471Z
Electron: 32.2.1
Chromium: 128.0.6613.186
Node.js: 20.18.0
V8: 12.8.374.38-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.0.0

Interpreter details:

R 4.3.1 in Ubuntu 22.04

Describe the issue:

May be a duplicated issue ( I have searched but not sure). HTML widget in R can not show in remote SSH sessions. It works well in local.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

In remote SSH:

# from https://gt.rstudio.com/articles/case-study-gtcars.html
library(tidyverse)
library(gt)
gtcars_8 <-
  gtcars |>
  group_by(ctry_origin) |>
  slice_head(n = 2) |>
  ungroup() |>
  filter(ctry_origin != "United Kingdom")
gtcars_8 |>
  group_by(ctry_origin) |>
  gt()

Expected or desired behavior:

Showing HTML widget output in Viewer.

Were there any error messages in the UI, Output panel, or Developer Tools console?

No, but viewer can't show it.

[jmcphers]

Thanks, I can reproduce this with GT.

Interestingly enough the plumbing seems to be working correctly; you can see above that we're opening up a port to proxy the URL for the widget, and in fact if I use the "open in new window" gesture the browser can load the content just fine:

I don't have any trouble with other HTML widgets, though; DT works fine.

Are you seeing this with any packages other than GT?

[ZhimingYe]

Thanks @jmcphers ! That’s really strange! DT also isn’t working in my environment. Emm, might be related to firewall? , but everything in VSCode seems to be working fine... So it doesn't be like to.

In Positron:

In VSCode:

─ Session info ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.3.1 (2023-06-16)
 os       Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  en_US.UTF-8
 ctype    en_US.UTF-8
 tz       Asia/Shanghai
 date     2025-01-17
 pandoc   NA

─ Packages ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package     * version date (UTC) lib source
 bslib         0.5.1   2023-08-11 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 cachem        1.0.8   2023-05-01 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 cli           3.6.1   2023-03-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 crosstalk     1.2.0   2021-11-04 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 digest        0.6.33  2023-07-07 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 DT          * 0.30    2023-10-05 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 fastmap       1.1.1   2023-02-24 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 htmltools     0.5.8.1 2024-04-04 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 htmlwidgets   1.6.2   2023-03-17 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 jquerylib     0.1.4   2021-04-26 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 jsonlite      1.8.7   2023-06-29 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 magrittr      2.0.3   2022-03-30 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 R6            2.5.1   2021-08-19 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 rlang         1.1.1   2023-04-28 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 sass          0.4.7   2023-07-15 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 sessioninfo   1.2.2   2021-12-06 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)
 yaml          2.3.7   2023-01-23 [1] CRAN (R 4.3.1)

 [1] /home/yezhiming/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3
 [2] /usr/local/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /usr/lib/R/site-library
 [4] /usr/lib/R/library

─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

[jmcphers]

If you press this button:

it should open a web browser. Does the widget appear in that browser?

[ZhimingYe]

No, web browser can't show it. @jmcphers

Based on your comment, I do some further investigation. This might because the SSH extension occasionally fails to handle port forwarding for HTML widgets properly, which could potentially affect all components.

If I don't do anything, web browser can't show anything:

If I manually add this port to port forwarding, the webpage will display.

After manually configuring port forwarding, the display issue with DT was completely resolved.

GT can also display in the right of Positron!

However, it seems that in your testing environment, GT fails to display even when port forwarding is established. I don’t have any ideas about this difference...