R Setup

Installing and configuring R.
Author

Michael McCarthy

Published

January 24, 2023

R

R is an open source programming language for wrangling, visualizing, modelling, and communicating data, and so much more. It has a strong community behind it and is widely used among researchers, statisticians, and data scientists in a variety of fields.

Installing rig

rig is an open source R installation manager for installing, removing, configuring, and switching between multiple R versions and user-level package libraries.

Install rig from the Terminal with Homebrew:

brew tap r-lib/rig
brew install --cask rig

Installing R

Install the latest version of R from the Terminal with rig:

rig add release

R can also be installed from CRAN (the comprehensive R archive network) using the following link https://cloud.r-project.org. A new major version of R comes out once a year, and there are 2-3 minor releases each year.

Installing RStudio

RStudio is an open source integrated development environment, or IDE, for R programming made by Posit.

Install RStudio from the Terminal with Homebrew:

brew install --cask rstudio

RStudio can also be installed from Posit using the following link https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/. RStudio is updated a couple of times a year. When a new version is available, RStudio will let you know. It’s a good idea to upgrade regularly so you can take advantage of the latest and greatest features.

Learn more from the RStudio User Guide.

Installing Quarto

Quarto is an open source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc.

Install Quarto from the Terminal with Homebrew:

brew install --cask quarto

If you need to manage and switch between versions of Quarto you can also install qvm, the Quarto version manager.