Our goal is for everyone’s computer to have a “sufficiently-current” version of R and access to git.
Accordingly, we are encouraging folks to have a version of R >= 3.4, and to have git accessible from the command-line.
As usual, we refer to Jenny Bryan et al’s Happy Git and GitHub for the useR for both R installation and git installation.
Every so often, you have to update your R installation. Before installing anything try the Verification to see if you need to do anything.
The installation itself is, thankfully, “turn-the-crank”. Go to this CRAN page, then follow the Download and Install R link for your OS.
If you change minor versions, e.g. 3.4 -> 3.5, you also have to reinstall all your packages.
This is my basic set of packages that then install a bunch of other packages:
install.packages(c("tidyverse", "rmarkdown", "shiny", "devtools"))
If I am working on a project, and I don’t have a required package installed, the RStudio IDE will tell me, then offer to install it for me. Usually within a few-days, I’m caught-up. There are some techniques out there that try to make this easier; perhaps I am set-in-my-ways such that I don’t mind doing this manually.
R.version.string
[1] "R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20)"
What we want here is that your R version is at least 3.4, but it might be nice if we were all at 3.5.3.
Good news: (re-)installing git is something we need to do much-more-rarely than re-installing R. Generally, we re-install git when we upgrade our operating system.
Before installing anything, try the Verification - if it works, no need to install anything. If you are on macOS, your computer may offer to install “developer command-line tools”; we suggest you accept the offer!
If you are on Windows, we recommend you install Git for Windows.
Following Happy Git’s adivce:
- NOTE: When asked about “Adjusting your PATH environment”, make sure to select “Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software”. Otherwise, we believe it is good to accept the defaults.
- Note that RStudio for Windows prefers for Git to be installed below
C:/Program Filesand this appears to be the default. This implies, for example, that the Git executable on my Windows system is found atC:/Program Files/Git/bin/git.exe. Unless you have specific reasons to otherwise, follow this convention.
Again, we follow Happy Git.
The neat thing about asking macOS about our git version is that it will offer to install git for us if it is not installed.
From the Terminal pane in your RStudio IDE, type:
git --version
On macOS, you may get a on offer to install developer command-line tools, take the offer! For our purposes, you need only the Xcode command line tools (not all of Xcode).
I get this:
git version 2.17.2 (Apple Git-113)
On Windows, I get this:
git version 2.21.0.windows.1