Install and set up R and RStudio

Before the workshop starts, you’ll need to install R (the programming language), RStudio (the editor/IDE we’ll use to interact with R), and if you can, two R packages.

The instructions to do so follow below.

1 Install R and RStudio

There’s a separate tab with instructions for each operating system:

Installation on Windows:

  1. Install R: download and run this .exe file from CRAN.

  2. Install RStudio: Click the download button below “Install RStudio” on this page.

Install as administrator if possible

Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on the .exe file and select “Run as administrator” instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.

The video below walks you through this process:

Installation on MacOS:

  1. Install R: download and run this .pkg file from CRAN.

  2. Install RStudio: Click the download button below “Install RStudio” on this page.

The video below walks you through this process:

Installation on Linux:

  1. Install R: Instructions for R installation on various Linux platforms (Debian, Fedora, Redhat, and Ubuntu) can be found at https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/.

  2. Install RStudio: Click the download button below “Install RStudio” on this page.

2 Install two R packages

If you are comfortable doing so, please install two so-called R packages (basically, add-ons to the functionality of the language) that we will be using during the workshop, which you do as follows:

  1. Open RStudio on your computer

  2. In RStudio, find the R “Console”: this is the primary tab in the (bottom) left pane

  3. Type or paste the following commands in the Console, pressing Enter (Return) after each:

    • install.packages("gapminder")
    • install.packages("tidyverse")

  4. You should see lots of text stream by in the Console while the installation is going on. When it’s done, test that the packages were successfully installed by running:

    • library(gapminder)
    • library(tidyverse)

    The first command should produce no output, but the second should, similar to what’s shown in this screenshot:

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