Installing RCall.jl

RCall.jl requires that a recent version of R, at least 3.4.0, be installed.

Standard installations

If R has been installed using one of the standard approaches below, then RCall.jl can simply be installed with

Pkg.add("RCall")

Should you experience problems with any of these methods, please open an issue.

OS X

The CRAN .pkg or the homebrew/science tap.

Most Linux distributions allow installation of R from their package manager, however these are often out of date, and may not work with RCall.jl. We recommend that you use the updated repositories from CRAN.

Ubuntu

The following will update R on recent versions of Ubuntu:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9
sudo add-apt-repository -y "deb http://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -s -c)/"
sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y r-base r-base-dev

Updating R

If you have updated the R installation, you may need to rebuild the RCall cache via

Base.compilecache("RCall")

Other methods

If you have installed R by some other method, then some further modifications may be necessary, for example, if you're building R from scratch, or the files have been copied but not installed in the usual manner (common on cluster installations).

Firstly, try setting the R_HOME environmental variable to the location of your R installation, which can be found by running R.home() from within R. This can be set in your ~/.juliarc.jl file via the ENV global variable, e.g.

ENV["R_HOME"] = ...

You may also need to specify the variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH before launching Julia, for example

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:`R RHOME`/lib"
julia

Windows PATH

The PATH environmental variable should contain the location of your R binary, and the HOME variable should contain the current user's home directory. These need to be set before Julia is started.