Installing R and RStudio on Redhat/CentOS Linux

As part of our forthcoming magazine article “Building an Analytical Platform” for SAP we described the need to install both R and RStudio.

Our test system is an older CentOs 5.8 Linux box and so needs to use the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) packages

As ‘root’ on your system perform the following four commands (Note: Version numbers may vary)

To install R

rpm -ivh http://mirror.chpc.utah.edu/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
yum install R

To install RStudio

wget http://download2.rstudio.org/rstudio-server-0.96.316-i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh rstudio-server-0.96.316-i686.rpm

You can check out the RSudio versions at: http://rstudio.org/download/server

Once you have done this (and assuming you don’t need to open any firewalls etc.) you can simply use the URL in your web browser.

http://< ;your-server-name-here>;:8787

The username and password will be the same as you would use to log into the server that R and RStudio are hosted on.

Upgrading R and RStudio to subsequent releases is also simple.

To update R as ‘root’ on your system simply type

yum update R

To update RStudio simply repeat the steps above – but changing the version numbers

You can also find other useful R resources at: http://www.r-bloggers.com