R console not loading .RProfile on startup

[EllaKaye]

System details:

Positron and OS details:

Positron Version: 2025.08.0 build 130
Code - OSS Version: 1.102.0
Commit: 76ddce5
Date: 2025-08-01T20:08:51.894Z
Electron: 35.6.0
Chromium: 134.0.6998.205
Node.js: 22.15.1
V8: 13.4.114.21-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Session details:

R 4.5.1
LLM model used in for Positron Assistant: Claude 4 Sonnet

Describe the issue:

In my global .RProfile I have the line:

options(my_option = "hello")

When I start an R Session in Position and run getOption("my_option") it returns NULL. It's the same when I start R in the Positron terminal and try from there. When I run the same line of code in the latest RStudio, or in R in the Mac terminal app, I get "hello" as expected.

I've tried debugging this with Positron Assistant, which suggested trying the following commands - here they are with the output:

> file.exists("~/.Rprofile")
[1] TRUE
> path.expand("~/.Rprofile")
[1] "/Users/ellakaye/.Rprofile"
> Sys.getenv("HOME")
[1] "/Users/ellakaye"
> Sys.getenv("R_USER")
[1] ""
> R.home()
[1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources"
> list.files(R.home("etc"), pattern = "profile|environ", full.names = TRUE)
[1] "/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.5-arm64/Resources/etc/Renviron"
> getOption("my_option")
NULL
> try(source("~/.Rprofile"))
> getOption("my_option")
[1] "hello"

It then advised me to file a bug report!

Steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Add options(my_option = "hello") to your global .RProfile
2. Try calling getOption("my_option") in Positron

Expected or desired behavior:

getOption("my_option") returns "hello".

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

No

[isabelizimm]

Hello there! Thank you for trying out Positron and letting us know about this 👾 it looks like we have a similar report in #6892, are you able to see if this is the same problem you are experiencing and add a 👍 or additional info on your use case?

[jennybc]

I can't reproduce this. First, I set lots of options in my .Rprofile and those values are indeed set in my R sessions inside Positron.

But I also added @EllaKaye's exact example and restarted R and that is also set:

R 4.5.0 restarted.
> getOption("my_option")
[1] "hello"

So there must be some other important factor in @EllaKaye's case.

[jennybc]

Just to make sure: @EllaKaye in many places you say .RProfile but it's actually .Rprofile (lowercase "p", not uppercase "P"). I doubt this is what's going on, but just want to double check that there's not some file confusion going on.

Do you have other code in .Rprofile that might be erroring? Have you put something obvious at the start that just prints to screen?

[EllaKaye]

Hi @isabelizimm and @jennybc thanks for looking into this. You're right, it is .Rprofile (with lowercase "p").

My apologies, there was something else going in - in Positron I had a folder open that I hadn't realised had it's own project-scoped .Rprofile file 🤦 so no wonder my user-scoped option wasn't showing up! Either adding the option to the project file or closing the folder, my user-scoped option was there are should be. No bug!