How to Install R on Ubuntu 20.04

R is an open-source, widely used for developing statistical software and performing data analysis. It is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. This tutorial explains how to install R on Ubuntu 20.04.

Prerequisites

You should logged in as root or user account with sudo privileges.
Ubuntu 20.04 system should have at least 1 GB of RAM.

Installing R on Ubuntu

R is a fast-moving project, the latest stable version isn’t always available from Ubuntu repositories, so we’ll need to add the external repository maintained by CRAN.

Follow the below steps to install latest stable version of R on Ubuntu:

First, you should install required packages to add new repository. Run following command to install dependencies:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https software-properties-common

Enable CRAN repository and add the CRAN GPG key to your system by issuing below command:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/'

Once the repository added you should update package list by typing:

sudo apt update

Next issue below command to install R on Debian:

sudo apt install r-base

Verify the installation by running the following command which will print the R version:

R --version

R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24) -- "Arbor Day"
Copyright (C) 2020 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
...
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

>

Install R Packages from CRAN

R has wide range of add-on packages through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). You should install build-essential package which contains the tools required for compiling R Packages.

sudo apt install build-essential

For demonstration purposes, we will install stringr package which provides fast, correct implementations of common string manipulations.

Start by opening the R console as root:

sudo -i R

It will show as below:

R version 4.0.0 (2020-04-24) -- "Arbor Day"
Copyright (C) 2020 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
...
Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

>

To install stringr package, type:

install.packages("stringr")

Installation will take some time and after completion load library using:

library(stringr)

Let’s create a simple vector named demo:

demo <- c("How", "to", "Install", "R", "on", "Ubuntu", "20.04")

Now run the below command to print the length of a string:

str_length(demo)

[1] 3 2 7 1 2 6 5

If you want to install more packages you can find it at CRAN Packages.

Conclusion

You have successfully learned how to install R on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.

If you have any problem or suggestion please leave a comment below.

Tags: ubuntu