prncevince / r-shims

R / RStudio utility shims to open R with the specified minor version.

R Shims

• Supported Platforms / Setups
  • Mac
  • Windows
• Download / Install
  • Mac
  • Windows
• Usage
• Problems
  • Mac
• Why Shims?

Inspired by a need to synchronize minor versions of R (x.y, e.g. 4.0 in 4.0.3) across projects. Puts shims for R, Rscript, and rstudio utilities on the PATH after manual edition to dot-profile.

Does not handle installing R.

Some conversation for handling the use of different versions of R stemmed from below issue:

• rstudio/renv#254

Some other projects that handle this:

• rig - The R Installation Manager
• rcli
• renv / renv-installer utility (not R package), which stems from pyenv
• RSwitch for macOS - GUI and CLI utility

Supported Platforms / Setups

Mac

Regular Mac binary CRAN .pkg installs. Simple and effective. Not as complex as aforementioned projects.

When running the macOS .pkg installer, always run this first to keep the old install:

sudo pkgutil --forget org.R-project.arm64.R.fw.pkg

Windows

Windows Unix Terminal emulators setups with R & RStudio installs to the %localappdata% directory. This achieves a nice per user setup.

R installations must be installed to the below directory using the convention, with x.y.z being your major.minor.patch version of R. This allows for multiple installations of R to exist within your %userprofile% on the system.

• %localappdata%/R/R-x.y.z

RStudio installations must be installed to the below directory

• %localappdata%/RStudio

Download / Install

Mac

git clone --single-branch --branch mac https://github.com/prncevince/r-shims $HOME/.R/shims

Use git pull in your $HOME/.R/shims directory to update as needed.

Add to your Bash/Zsh dot profile:

export PATH="$HOME/.R/shims:$PATH"

For each version of R that you have installed, edit the /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/x.y/Resources/bin/R shell file. Comment out lines 31 and add a line below it setting R_HOME_DIR to the value of R_HOME. It should look like so:

if test -n "${R_HOME}" && \
  test "${R_HOME}" != "${R_HOME_DIR}"; then
  #echo "WARNING: ignoring environment value of R_HOME"
  R_HOME_DIR="${R_HOME}"
fi
R_HOME="${R_HOME_DIR}"

Windows

As advertised, this is developed for Unix terminal emulators, e.g. Git for Windows.

git clone --single-branch --branch windows https://github.com/prncevince/r-shims $HOME/.R/shims

Use git pull in your $HOME/.R/shims directory to update as needed.

Add to your Bash/Zsh dot profile:

export PATH="$HOME/.R/shims:$PATH"

Make sure that Rtools is on top of the PATH that is accessed by R. When R is invoked by a shell, it inherits the PATH environment variable, which can mess up which sh is invoked by RStudio when creating a new RStudio Project if Rtools is added to the end of the PATH versus being put on top. This seems to create a nasty perpetual loop invoking make.

You can do this by adding to your %localappdata%/R/R-x.y.z/etc/Renviron.site something like so for your version of Rtools:

PATH="${LOCALAPPDATA}\Rtools\rtools40\usr\bin;${PATH}"

Usage

Create a .Rversion file containing the minor version of R (x.y) in the root of your repo.

• e.g. echo 4.0 > .Rversion

cd to the repo's root directory.

To open RStudio with the specified version of R, and inside a *.Rproj if also in the repo, simply run:

rstudio

To just run the specified version of R, use R or Rscript in the usual way.

Problems

Here, we layout know system problems that are unavoidable, unless changes to the source code of RStudio or R are made.

Mac

Restarting the R session in RStudio will always startup the system version of R, i.e. the symbolic link /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/Current.

Why Shims?

Programs that utilize R (e.g. GNU Make), access the current shells PATH environment variable, but not aliases/functions. Thus, shims are necessary for programs like GNU Make to use the updated R/Rscript utilities.

In addition, they don't plague your dot-profile with functions/aliases. There are many other reasons as well.