E-mail Tips and Installing R Packages Locally

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006, 2:00 P.M.

E-mail Tips

Installing R Packages Locally

If you want to install your own R packages but you don't have superuser access to the computer you're working on (such as your workstation or statcomp), you can have R install them into your home directory (or any other directory you have write access to).

First create a directory where you want R to install packages, such as .R-library.

Next, you need to edit your ~/.bashrc file so that it sets the R_LIBS environment variable. This variable is what tells R where you want packages installed. Add the following line to the end of ~/.bashrc:

Whenever you edit your .bashrc file, you need to either close and re-open your console or re-source .bashrc by running source ~/.bashrc in order for the changes to apply. You only need to do this whenever you make changes; every time after that your console will be set up correctly. Go ahead and reload your settings now.

Now that you've got your R_LIBS environment variable set, R will always install packages into the .R-library directory, which lives in your home directory. You can test this by looking at the return value of the .libPaths function in R. If the .R-library directory is in the character vector returned by .libPaths(), then you've successfully set up R to install packages locally! This works with both the install.packages() function and by running R CMD INSTALL.

For more information about installing add on packages, check out the Add-on packages section of the R Installation and Administration Manual.