Installing additional R packages on Linux

On the managed Linux machines in the Statistics department there are a number of add-on packages for R that are managed by the statsoft group. Those packages are in /group/statsoft/Rlibs or /group/statsoft/Rlibs64 depending on the architecture of the machine. If you are logged into a linux machine in the 346 SH lab or a faculty/RA/TA box in SH, your R_LIBS environment variable has been set already to include the statsoft collection.

Most of the information that follows is taken from the R Installation and Administration Managing libraries section.

You can check to see what your R library search path is by starting R and running .libPaths(). An example is shown below:

> .libPaths() [1] "/group/statsoft/Rlibs64" "/usr/lib64/R/library"

Make sure R is NOT running before you start.

1. Create a directory in your home directory you would like to install the R packages, e.g.
   mkdir ~/Rlibs
2. Alter your .cshrc or .bashrc to set the R_LIBS environment variable. If you don't know if you need to use .cshrc or .bashrc for your shell, it will likely be .cshrc
   For .cshrc:
   if ($?R_LIBS) then
     setenv R_LIBS ~/Rlibs:$R_LIBS
   else
     setenv R_LIBS ~/Rlibs
   endif
   For .bashrc:
   if [ -n $R_LIBS ]; then
     export R_LIBS=~/Rlibs:$R_LIBS
   else
     export R_LIBS=~/Rlibs
   fi
3. Run source .cshrc and then start R (bash users should source .bashrc).
4. Now when you run .libPaths(), you should see something similar to:
   > .libPaths()
   [1] "/space/hbrown/Rlibs" "/group/statsoft/Rlibs64"
   [3] "/usr/lib64/R/library"
5. You should now be able to run:
   install.packages('packagename',"~/Rlibs","http://streaming.stat.iastate.edu/CRAN")
   to install a package (replace 'packagename' with the actual name of the package you want installed). If you leave "packagename" blank, you'll get a list of all available packages.

If you need to add an additional package later, run install.packages( ) from within R to install what you need. You can get more information about the install.packages( ) command by running ?install.packages( )

If you'd like to see which libraries are available in your R library path, run: library()