Installing R/Rstudio

These are instructions for downloading and installing R and Rstudio.

Download R

R is the language/environment (the engine).

  1. Go to the CRAN (Collective R Archive Network) website: https://cran.r-project.org/
  2. Click on the appropriate operating system (Mac or Windows) to navigate to download page.
  3. Download the most recent version of R. If Mac, select the first .pkg file listed in the “files” section (e.g., R-3.4.3.pkg). If Windows, select “base” (it’s the same link as the bolded message about ‘installing R for the first time’).
  4. Double (run) click downloaded file (check Downloads folder). Click yes through prompts to install like any other program. You may get a warning about the source of the download being unkown. Do whatever you can to allow the installation to continue—I promise the R pkg file is safe!

Download Rstudio

Rstudio is the graphical user interface (GUI) that makes it easy to use R. Once both R and Rstudio are installed, you can ignore R and only open/use Rstudio moving forward (Rstudio will use R, but you won’t have to interact with it directly).

  1. Go to the free download location on Rstudio’s website: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download
  2. Select one of the highlighted options that corresponds with your computer’s operating system (Mac or PC)
  3. Double (run) click downloaded file (check Downloads folder). Click yes through prompts to install like any other program. You may get a warning about the source of the download being unkown. Do whatever you can to allow the installation to continue—I promise the R pkg file is safe!

Using R/Rstudio

Double click Rstudio, which should be found in your applications/programs folder.