install-rstats

Install various versions of R on macOS and Windows

Features

• Downloads and installs multiple R versions, with a single command.
• Supports symbolic version names: release, devel and oldrel.
• On Windows, it installs the correct Rtools versions (if they are not installed already), and sets them up.
• Patches R to allow running multiple R versions at the same time. (macOS, not needed for Windows)
• Adds symlinks/shortcuts to start a certain R version: e.g. R-4.0.
• Updates access rights of to forbid installing packages into the system R library. (macOS, not needed for Windows)
• Creates user package libraries.

Install

$ npm install -g install-rstats

Usage

Command line

install-rstats [rversion1] [rversion2] ...

On macOS, if you start install-rstats wihout sudo, it will ask for your password (once) in a dialog box. If you want to avoid that, use sudo at the line:

sudo install-rstats [rversion1] [rversion2] ...

From node.js

Use the install() function and supply the desired R versions in an array. If no version is given, it installs the latest R release.

Example:

const installr = require('install-rstats');

(async () => {
    await installr.install(['3.6', '4.0', 'devel'])
})();

Supported R versions

• release is the current R release,
• oldrel is the latest release of the previous minor branch,
• devel is a development snapshot,
• x.y is the latest release of the x.y branch,
• x.y.z is version x.y.z.

License

ISC @ R Consortium

This repo is part of the R-hub project, supported by the R Consortium.