Installing R Packages

How to install the R packages needed for data science work, verify your installation using the DataScienceExercises package, and set up LaTeX for PDF output.

Getting Started with R Step 2 of 7 ← Installing R and RStudio  ·  First Steps in R → View full track →

Video lecture

1 Installing R packages

After installing R and R-Studio, you still need to install a number of so called R packages. We will learn more about what packages are and how to use them later. Nevertheless, it is strongly recommended to install all the packages you will need over the following semester already now. This way you make sure that everything is working, and you save yourself from trouble during the semester. Moreover, installing these packages is necessary to do the exercises provided after each session.

To install packages, a stable internet connection is required. Then, proceed as follows:

1. Download the installation script provided by your course and save it in a directory of your choice.
2. Open the file in R-Studio. To this end, right-click on the file and select Open with, and then choose R-Studio.
3. Adjust the first line of the script to the OS you are using (e.g. "Mac" or "Windows").
4. Select all the lines and click on the button Run.
5. Check if the package here was installed. You will get the respective message in the console.

If you encounter any problems, please make a screenshot and describe the problem in detail when asking for help.

6. Select the rest of the script and run it as you did with the first lines. If you get a success message at the end, all packages were installed successfully.

Note: you may see the following message during the installation process:

Do you want to install from sources the packages which need compilation?

I recommend typing No and pressing enter. If the installation is not successful you might run the installation commands again and try responding with Yes, which sometimes fixes the problem.

2 Verify the usability of exercises

If everything worked until here you should be able to access the exercise sets provided after each session via the DataScienceExercises package. To make sure everything works as expected, please run the following command in the console and press enter:

learnr::run_tutorial(
  name = "Basics",
  package = "DataScienceExercises",
  shiny_args=list("launch.browser"=TRUE))

If the exercise window opens, everything is working correctly.

After you closed the window and the process is still active, just click on the Stop button in R-Studio, and then click on the Console tab on the left to return to the console.

See the blog post on DataScienceExercises for full installation instructions for the exercises package.

3 Installing LaTeX

To create PDF-documents you have to install a LaTeX distribution. It is recommended to install the distribution tinytex, no matter whether you already have a different distribution or not.

The easiest route is to install tinytex via Quarto. If you have not yet installed Quarto, follow the instructions on this webpage.

Then follow the instructions from this tutorial. What you essentially need to do is to open your terminal and issue the following command:

quarto install tinytex

To make sure everything runs smoothly you should create a small test .qmd file and try to render it as a PDF by clicking the Render button in R-Studio.

If this works you are all set. If there are any errors showing up, please search for solutions online or ask for help.

3.1 A common problem when installing tinytex on a Mac

If after the attempted installation of tinytex you see an error message about missing paths, execute the following command in your R console within R-Studio:

tinytex::install_tinytex(force = TRUE)

Then close R-Studio and restart your computer. If the problem persists, please open your Mac Terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo chown -R `whoami`:admin /usr/local/bin

~/Library/TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr path add

Then install tinytex again as described above, restart your computer, and try to render a PDF again.