How to install R on Ubuntu 20.04

To say about one of the most popular and extensible languages, in this article we are going to learn you how to install R on Ubuntu 20.04. It is An open-source programming language and is widely used for performing data analysis and statistical computing. With an active community and supported by the R Foundation for statistical computing, R offers many user-generated packages for specific areas of study, which makes it applicable to many fields. In the following, you may learn how to install R and how to add packages from the official Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).

Prerequisites

The tutorial may be more useful if you know:

about 1GB of RAM (at least)
a non-root user with sudo privileges
To set up, follow our Initial server setup on Ubuntu 20.04

Recommended Article: Introducing SSH Connection Softwares

How to install R on Ubuntu 20.04

1- Installing R

First, add the GPG key.

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

After running, you should face the below output.

Output

Executing: /tmp/apt-key-gpghome.cul0ddtmN1/gpg.1.sh --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9  gpg: key 51716619E084DAB9: public key "Michael Rutter <[email protected]>" imported  gpg: Total number processed: 1  gpg:               imported: 1

After receiving the trusted key, you can add the repository. In case you are not using 20.04, find the relevant repository from the R Project Ubuntu list.

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

Identify lines as below, when output displays.

Output

...  Get:7 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/ InRelease [3622 B]                    Get:8 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/ Packages [15.6 kB]  ...

To include package manifests from the new repository, run update after this.

sudo apt update

One of the output lines should appear as below.

Output

...  Hit:5 https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu focal-cran40/ InRelease  ...

In order to see the update command in the output, the repository addition is successful.

Now install R with the following command.

sudo apt install r-base

To confirm the installation, press y to continue.

It is better to install an example package for every user on the system. So start R as root so that the libraries will be available to all users automatically. If you need to set a personal library for your user, run the R command without sudo

sudo -i R

Output

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.    >

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2- Installing R packages from CRAN

As one of the R’s features is an abundance of add-on packages, you can install txtplot, a library that outputs ASCII graphs that include scatterplot, line plot, density plot, act, and bar charts to reach demonstration purposes.

install.packages('txtplot')

Output

...  Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’  (as ‘lib’ is unspecified)  ...

Load txtplot, after installation.

library('txtplot')

If there are no error messages, the installation is successful.

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