Chapter 9 Set up an R dev environment
There are two different types of R packages you can install, binary
packages and source packages. When you install released packages from CRAN
using install.packages()
you are installing binary packages.1 When you install development packages using
devtools::install_github()
you are installing source packages.
We recommend the devtools
package to install source packages from GitHub and
elsewhere, and also to install (and develop) packages you may write yourself.
devtools
can be installed from CRAN like any other package.
Once a binary or source package is installed they are identical, however source packages which include C/C++ or Fortran code require additional tools to install, so there is additional system preparation needed.
9.1 Windows: system prep
On Windows the compiler collection needed for installing packages from source is called Rtools.
Rtools is NOT an R package, so it is not installed with
install.packages()
. Instead download it from
http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/ and run the installer.
During the Rtools installation you will see a window asking you to “Select Additional Tasks”.
- Do not select the box for
“Add rtools to system PATH”,
devtools
and RStudio should put Rtools on the PATH automatically when it is needed. - Do select the box for “Save version information to registry” (it should be selected by default).
9.2 macOS: system prep
On macOS you will need to install the Xcode Command Line Tools, which may already be installed. You can check if they are by running
If they are not installed you have a few options.
Minimalist approach (what I do): Install Xcode Command Line Tools. In the shell:
xcode-select --install
Install the current release of full Xcode from the Mac App Store. WAY more stuff than you need but the advantage is App Store convenience.
9.3 Verify system prep
If this function runs without error then congratulations, your R installation is properly set up!
9.4 What about Homebrew?
Users on macOS often install R with homebrew via this formula:
Unfortunately, when R is installed in this way it is not compatible with the CRAN package binaries, which means you must build and install all packages from source. This takes additional time during installation and can lead to more time spent dealing with installation issues if a package fails to compile.
Instead, if you prefer the convenience of homebrew, we recommend installing the
r
cask. NOTE: the cask used to be named r-app
but the -app
suffix was
dropped due to a homebrew policy change around 2019-03-11.
This will install the CRAN R distribution, so all package binaries will be available just like they would be from installing R manually.
9.5 What about Conda?
Some users use conda in python contexts and notice that conda now also provides (some) R package binaries.
However we would suggest avoiding conda at this time, only a limited number of
all CRAN packages are available2 and
many users run into installation problems trying to use install.packages()
inside conda environments. Using install.packages()
also means you no longer
declare all dependencies in the same location. Which means your work is less
reproducible than if you always install only conda packages.
For these reasons we suggest you either restrict yourself only to packages available as official conda packages, or avoid using conda for R.