R notes

Installing and updating

On Debian

To install R:

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

On MacOS

brew install r

Package management

Install packages using install.packages(). Whenever R has a new update in the distribution (3.4 to 3.5, for example), packages will generally need to be reinstalled also. The location they are installed to can vary and R may ask.

Often R complains about missing Debian packages (curl, ssl) and may fail if miniconda/anaconda is already installed (may want to change dir name).

On Debian

Packages are installed from a CRAN repository to a local library directory. The default users library must be created at ~/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/{version#}, but packages can also be installed to /usr/local/lib/R/site-library if permissions allow.

On MacOS

Packages are installed to /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.6/Resources/library

Package list

My usual list of packages to update is:

install.packages(c('tidyverse', 'xts', 'rgdal', 'data.table', 'automap', 'forecast', 'ggmap', 'cowplot', 'raster', 'SPEI', 'lubridate'))

Sometimes the core R packages on Debian go out of date and need to be updated. Start R with sudo and run:

update.packages()

Jupyter R notebooks

To run R in Jupyter notebooks install IRKernel using the linux source method (libzmq3-dev first).