Skip to main content

EPIB607

16 Installing R and RStudio

This section is adapted from the books Data Science in Education Using R117 and The Epidemiologist R Handbook118

16.1 Why use R?

As stated on the R project website, R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is highly versatile, extendable, and community-driven.

Cost

R is free to use! There is a strong ethic in the community of free and open-source material.

Reproducibility

Conducting your data management and analysis through a programming language (compared to Excel or another primarily point-click/manual tool) enhances reproducibility, makes error-detection easier, and eases your workload.

Community

The R community of users is enormous and collaborative. New packages and tools to address real-life problems are developed daily, and vetted by the community of users. As one example, R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community, and is one of the largest organizations of R users. It likely has a chapter near you!

16.2 Downloading R, RStudio and LaTeX

First, you will need to download the latest versions of R119 and RStudio.120 R is a free environment for statistical computing and graphics using the programming language R. RStudio is a set of integrated tools that allows for a more user-friendly experience for using R.

Although you will likely use RStudio as your main console and editor, you must first install R as RStudio uses R behind the scenes. Both R and RStudio are freely available, cross-platform, and open-source.

Permissions
Note that you should install R and RStudio to a drive where you have read and write permissions. Otherwise, your ability to install R packages (a frequent occurrence) will be impacted. If you encounter problems, try opening RStudio by right-clicking the icon and selecting “Run as administrator”. Other tips can be found in the page [R on network drives].

16.2.1 To Download R:

  • Visit CRAN (https://cran.r-project.org/) to download R
  • Find your operating system (Mac, Windows, or Linux)
  • Select the “latest release” on the page for your operating system
  • Download and install the application

Don’t worry; you will not mess anything up if you download (or even install!) the wrong file. Once you’ve installed R, you can get started.

16.2.2 To Download RStudio:

  • Visit RStudio’s website (https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/) to download RStudio
  • Under the column called “RStudio Desktop FREE”, click “Download”
  • Find your operating system (Mac, Windows, or Linux)
  • Select the “latest release” on the page for your operating system
  • Download and install the application

If you do have issues, an excellent place to get help is the RStudio Community forums (https://community.rstudio.com/).

16.2.3 To Download LaTeX:

TinyTex is a custom LaTeX distribution, useful when trying to produce PDFs from R.
See https://yihui.org/tinytex/ for more informaton.

To install TinyTex from R:

install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex()
# to uninstall TinyTeX, run tinytex::uninstall_tinytex()