The term “R” is used to refer to both the programming language and the software that interprets the scripts written using it.
RStudio is currently a very popular way to not only write your R scripts but also to interact with the R software.
R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you install RStudio.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed:
Windows
- Download R from the CRAN website
- Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
- Go to the RStudio download page
- Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows Vista/7/8/10 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
- Double click the file to install it
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
MacOS
- Download R from the CRAN website
- Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
- Double click on the downloaded file to install R
- It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
- Go to the RStudio download page
- Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
- Double click the file to install RStudio
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Linux
- Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are out of date in some distributions. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.3.1.
- Go to the RStudio download page
- Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
- Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
RStudio is an application (an integrated development environment or IDE) that facilitates the use of R and offers a number of nice additional features. It can be downloaded here. You will need the free Desktop version for your computer.
Check after installing R
As a test that everything went well try to run:
sessionInfo()
You need to write sessionInfo() in the R terminal, which will be the bottom left quadrant in RStudio, and press enter.
The output should look something like:
R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/blas/libblas.so.3.7.1
LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lapack/liblapack.so.3.7.1
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_AU.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_PAPER=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C LC_MEASUREMENT=en_AU.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.0 tools_3.6.0 yaml_2.2.0
Please send me the output by email before the workshop. Let me know if you encounter an issue with installation.