Setup R environment

This post is to record the configuration steps of the R environment, which is a language as well as an eco-system for statistics and related computing and graphing. With the CRAN platform for sharing and exploring extra package of R, the capibility of the R language is much more extented.

R package installation steps

The target system of following steps is Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial). Apart from its code name which apeared in second step, most of the steps can also be applied to other version of ubuntu.

1. Add key of CRAN repository to system apt key store

   sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

2. Then add the R package entry to apt source list

   In this step, we can specify approprate mirror site to speed up package installation process. A full list of registered mirrors can accessed from CPAN’s website

   # use the official repository
   sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/'
   
   # or use an alternate source
   sudo add-apt-repository 'deb [arch=amd64,i386] https://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/CRAN/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/'

3. Update package list cache and install R package

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install r-base-dev

4. Configure mirror selection of R package and its local storage location

   At the startup time of R, two configuration file will be checked. One is the Rprofile file (including its global version and the user-specific one) for startup configuation written in R, and another is the Renviron file (including its global version and the user-specific one as well) for program wide system environment variables represented as key-value pairs.

   The default local storage of R package is a global path which generally require the permission from root user to modify. Hence a local package storage is more convenient.

   touch ~/.Renviron
   mkdir -p ~/lib/R/library
   echo 'R_LIBS_USER="~/lib/R/library"' >> ~/.Renviron

   The Rprofile can contain more items. The following configuration set the mirrors of CRAN packages.

   # ~/.Rprofile
   options("repos" = c(CRAN="https://mirrors.xjtu.edu.cn/CRAN/"))

R Studio

The most popular free and open source IDE for R is R Studio, which can be installed by downloading its debain package and install via dpkg.

# find the latest version of R Studio at 
# https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

# Current lastest version is 1.0.136
wget https://download1.rstudio.org/rstudio-1.0.136-amd64.deb -O ~/RStudio.deb
sudo dpkg --install ~/RStudio.deb

So far, a simple environment of R is setup.