Update R using RStudio

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How can I update R via RStudio?

Memorandum answered 1/12, 2012 at 5:29 Comment(1)

The answers are inconsistent and it seems many things have changed since the Q's and the A's... – Arrange 9/8, 2020 at 4:19

A

154

You install a new version of R from the official website.

RStudio should automatically start with the new version when you relaunch it.

In case you need to do it manually, in RStudio, go to :Tools -> options -> General.

Check @micstr's answer for a more detailed walkthrough.

Asbestosis answered 1/12, 2012 at 5:43 Comment(9)

RStudio detects this automatically... You only need to update the option if you want to use a different (previous, x32, x64) bit version. – Wentletrap 1/12, 2012 at 5:50

@Brandon Bertelsen How? It never updates my R version. And the 'update' in the help menu is the update of RStudio only. – Lorislorita 3/4, 2015 at 15:4

Outdated answer. You must restart RStudio after installing a new version of R. For RStudio to detect the new version automatically, close and reopen RStudio. – Lemuelah 12/12, 2015 at 6:48

@Lemuelah Really I don't understand your comment, for me close and reopen RStudio ~~restart RStudio – Asbestosis 12/12, 2015 at 9:43

@Asbestosis I recommend that you add to your answer that you must close and reopen RStudio (or restart RStudio, whichever wording you prefer). The "Then you change the path in your Rstudio option :Tools -> options -> General" did not work for me. However, restarting R did, so it would be good to update your answer to include this info. – Lemuelah 12/12, 2015 at 9:54

Guys of course you need to restart Rstudio to take effect – Talky 29/3, 2016 at 2:48

I use RStudio on Windows 10. I have the latest version of R (3.4.0 that I installed) and an earlier version (3.3.2 that was installed as a part of another program). RStudio doesn't load the latest version, i.e. 3.4.0, but I can manually set it on the latest version, and everything seems to be fine. – Airway 9/7, 2017 at 20:18

If you download the deb file to your user Downloads file, then Rstudio will NOT find it. You will still need to <somehow> tell Rstudio where to find it. – Jointed 30/5, 2019 at 0:27

maybe it's worth pointing out that on linux, you can update R via apt, just like everything else. perhaps you need to add the cran repository to your sources.list before you can get the newest release. for more info see here: cran.r-project.org/bin/linux – Tjirebon 24/3, 2021 at 16:7

D

304

For completeness, the answer is: you can't do that from within RStudio. @agstudy has it right - you need to install the newer version of R, then restart RStudio and it will automagically use the new version, as @Brandon noted.

It would be great if there was an update.R() function, analogous to the install.packages() function or the update.packages(function).

So, in order to install R,

go to http://www.r-project.org,
click on 'CRAN',
then choose the CRAN site that you like. I like Kansas: http://rweb.quant.ku.edu/cran/.
click on 'Download R for XXX' [where XXX is your operating system]
follow the installation procedure for your operating system
restart RStudio
rejoice

--wait - what about my beloved packages??--

ok, I use a Mac, so I can only provide accurate details for the Mac - perhaps someone else can provide the accurate paths for windows/linux; I believe the process will be the same.

To ensure that your packages work with your shiny new version of R, you need to:

move the packages from the old R installation into the new version; on Mac OSX, this means moving all folders from here:
```
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/2.15/Resources/library
```
to here:
```
/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library
```
[where you'll replace "2.15" and "3.0" with whatever versions you're upgrading from and to. And only copy whatever packages aren't already in the destination directory. i.e. don't overwrite your new 'base' package with your old one - if you did, don't worry, we'll fix it in the next step anyway. If those paths don't work for you, try using installed.packages() to find the proper pathnames.]

now you can update your packages by typing update.packages() in your RStudio console, and answering 'y' to all of the prompts.

> update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE)
class :
 Version 7.3-7 installed in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library 
 Version 7.3-8 available at http://cran.rstudio.com
Update (y/N/c)?  y
---etc---

finally, to reassure yourself that you have done everything, type these two commands in the RStudio console to see what you have got:
```
> version
> packageStatus()
```

Daw answered 12/7, 2013 at 23:15 Comment(8)

Whenever somebody says you can't do something with R it just makes me want to do it. Looks like it's time to hack together something with RCurl and some system calls... – Puttergill 12/7, 2013 at 23:23

I can't wait for you to make that happen :) – Daw 15/7, 2013 at 12:46

It's not my own work but this has already been done for Windows users: github.com/talgalili/installr – Puttergill 15/7, 2013 at 15:27

So the later answers has shown that neither the "correct" answer nor the highest voted answer gives a very complete answer, seems like this is so obvious here that something should be done to update this. – Deodorant 21/7, 2014 at 14:57

I note for others that your personal library of R packages on OSX might alternatively be located under ~/Library/R instead of /Library/Frameworks/... – Siloam 13/1, 2015 at 6:22

On Windows there is a personal library at C:\Users\username\R\win-library\3.2 (for R version 3.2.x) and the system libraries are at C:\Program Files\R\R-3.2.1\library (this is Windows Vista). – Zoom 8/8, 2015 at 1:10

The newer versions of R, I upgraded from 3.2.3 to 3.3.0. Automatically, takes care of copying the packages from previous version and updates them. So, I guess no more issue of how to save packages. – Burnedout 17/5, 2016 at 21:49

It seems there's finally an R package that updates R from RStudio using a Mac computer: github.com/AndreaCirilloAC/updateR – Communism 27/7, 2016 at 17:5