R is a free programming environment, mainly used (but not limited to) for statistical analysis. R is maintained by R Foundation. RStudio is a free integrated development environment (IDE) for R programming language.
This guide requires:
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A CentOS 7 machine.
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A sudo user, or root user.
Step 0 – Prerequisites
On CentOS 7, R is available to be installed using yum via epel package repository, so we need to add it first.
sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum update
sudo yum update
Step 1 – Install R
sudo yum install R -y
Verify
Let’s run the R console
Step 2 – Install RStudio Server
Can look for the latest available version here.
wget https://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-rhel-1.1.453-x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install rstudio-server-rhel-1.1.453-x86_64.rpm -y
sudo yum install rstudio-server-rhel-1.1.453-x86_64.rpm -y
Step 3 – Start and Log-in into RStudio
sudo systemctl status rstudio-server
This will also install a command-line utility ‘rstudio-server‘, can be used to check the status, or any active sessions, and more.
In case you’re installing it on a server (no GUI), you can use RStudio via browser, by opening the port RStudio is running on (8787 by default). For a GUI machine, just open the RStudio at http://localhost:8787, the following screen will appear, use the username and password you have used for installing the RStudio (sudo user).
Now if we look for active sessions
The RStudio
The dashboard has code editor, debugging and visualization tools.
Step 4 – Adding packages from CRAN (Optional)
CRAN stands for Comprehensive R Archive Network, has list of URLs from where R packages can be installed. Available CRAN mirrors.
There are packages which are not entirely written in R, hence may require compilation, for this it is required to install build tools. On CentOS 7 you can do so executing the following single command
sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
It’s a good practice to launch the R console as root user (using sudo) in case of installing a package.
sudo -i R
Once you’re inside the R console, now you can install packages – for demo I’ll be installing ‘txtplot’
install.packages('txtplot')
You”ll be prompted to select the mirror i.e. location you need to download from, the nearer the better, to minimze latency.
