Installing R on OS X

NOTE: The comments are a must read for this. Some excellent additional advice and “gotchas” by some super-helpful readers.

I was in a conversation with an academic colleague (wicked smart dude) and the subject of installing R came up (NOTE: this will happen to you, too, if you ever have the misfortune to have a face-to-face convo with me ;-). They noted that getting up and running with R was not as seamless as one would like it to be and, to be honest, I have to agree, especially after typing the rest of this post out.

I recently had a similar experience helping folks who use Windows get R & RStudio up and running and that’s even more of a nightmare, especially if you do not have Administrator privileges (or, perhaps I just scare easily).

Prior to these experiences, I never really stopped to consider just how less friendly the installation process of R is when compared to Excel, Tableau or other apps one might use for data analysis and visualization. Hopefully this will becomre a top priority for the R Consortium.

Since this colleague uses OS X, I offered to put together instructions for how to get R & RStudio installed and finally had 5 minutes to crank out a blog post to help the broader community with the information.

Get R

• Go to https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/macosx/
• If you're on a recent version of OS X, download the first .pkg link. As of this post, it's R-3.2.2.pkg and the direct URL is https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/macosx/R-3.2.2.pkg
• Install the package by double-clicking on it and working through the prompts.

Verify R itself is working

• Look in the Applications folder for the R application.
• Double-click it and you should see an R console window.
• If that did not work, try installing R again
• Once you've verified R is working, quit the app

Download RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment for R that will make your life and coding easier.

• Go to https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ and download the RStudio version for Mac OS X. It'll say something like RStudio 0.99.486 - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit). The direct URL for that verison (which was current at the time of this post) is https://download1.rstudio.org/RStudio-0.99.486.dmg
• Double-click that DMG file
• Drag the RStudio icon to the Applications folder.

Verify RStudio & R are working together

• Look in the Applications folder for the RStudio application.
• Double-click it and you should see an RStudio window with four panes.

From now on, just start RStudio when you want to work in R.

[Optional] Install XQuartz

Some functions in R require an “X11 Server” and/or libraries associated with an X11 server. Apple does not provide this software with OS X anymore so you have to do it on your own via a third-party application called XQuartz.

• Go to http://xquartz.macosforge.org/landing/ and download the top-most "quick download" disk image file. As of this post, that's version 2.7.8 and this is the direct link http://xquartz.macosforge.org/downloads/SL/XQuartz-2.7.8.dmg
• Double click the downloaded disk image then double click on the XQuartz.pkg and follow the installation steps.

[Optional] Install Xcode Tools

Some R packages require compilation. That requires utilities not installed on OS X by default. You can wait to do the following until it’s needed, but since you’re already installing things…

• Get Xcode https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835?mt=12 and install it like any "normal" Mac application
• When the intallation is done, open Xcode then close it just to verify it installed correctly
• Find and open the Terminal program in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder
• Paste the following into the Termainal window and hit enter/return (accept any dialog/prompt):

xcode-select --install`

• Close the Terminal application

[Optional] Set yourself up for easier future compiled package installation

Some R packages need additional libraries to work and most aren’t on your system by default. There are a myriad of ways to get these libraries, and the way I obtain them is via the homebrew utility. You can save yourself the trouble of installing homebrew later by doing the following now:

• Find and open the Terminal program in the Utilities folder under the Applications folder
• Paste the following into the Terminal window and hit enter/return:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

• Read and accept the various prompts until it's installed
• Close the Terminal application

You can now do brew install xyz in the future when a library is needed to support a package. Drop a note in the comments if you’d like this discussed more in a future blog post.

[Optional] [If you have an hour+ to kill] Install MacTeX

R has an academic history and there are many semi-advanced functions that are tied to something called latex. Installing latex for OS X is not hard, just time (and bandwidth) consuming (it’s about the same size as a new OS X installer). If you delve into package creation or do more detailed output work in R, you’ll want to install MacTex sooner than later.

• Go to https://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html and download the latest MacTeX.pkg file. This direct link should always work (until they change up the way their site works) http://tug.org/cgi-bin/mactex-download/MacTeX.pkg
• Double-click the pkg installer and follow the prompts. The defaults should all be good enough for now.

Fin

If you have any changes/additions/etc drop a note in the comments. I may even stick this on github to make it easier to contribute in the future.