Installing multiple versions of R on Linux

Installing Dependencies

First, ensure that you have the build dependencies required for R. On RedHat/CentOS you’d use this command:

$ sudo yum-builddep R

On Debian/Ubuntu systems you’d use this command:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep r-base

Configuring and Building R

Once you’ve satisfied the build dependencies, you should obtain and unarchive the source tarball for the version of R you want to install.  As an example, one mirror you can download R 3.X source from is: https://cran.rstudio.com/src/base/R-3/ 

Once the source is downloaded, from within the extracted source directory, execute these commands (this example assumes you are installing R 3.3.0):

$ sudo ./configure --prefix=/opt/R/3.3.0 --enable-R-shlib
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install

Note that the --enable-R-shlib option is required in order to make the underlying R shared library available to RStudio Workbench or RStudio Server.

Using the System BLAS Libraries

You may also wish to link to the system BLAS libraries rather than use the R internal versions. For this you’d use the following configure command:

sudo ./configure --prefix=/opt/R/3.3.0 --enable-R-shlib --with-blas --with-lapack

Open-Source RStudio Server

In the Open-Source RStudio Server, RStudio uses the version of R pointed to by the output of the which R command. If RStudio is unable to locate R using which R, it will fall back to scanning explicitly for the R script in the /usr/local/bin and /usr/bin directories. For more on this, see our article on using different versions of R here.

RStudio Workbench (previously RStudio Server Pro)

As of v0.99.715, RStudio Workbench (previously RStudio Server Pro) automatically scans for versions of R at the following locations:

/usr/lib/R
/usr/lib64/R
/usr/local/lib/R
/usr/local/lib64/R
/opt/local/lib/R
/opt/local/lib64/R

In addition, RStudio Workbench scans all subdirectories of the following directories within /opt:

/opt/R
/opt/local/R

For example, any of the following installed versions of R will be automatically detected by RStudio Workbench:

/opt/R/3.3.0
/opt/local/R/3.3.0

If you have versions of R located at other places in the file system RStudio Workbench can still utilize them however you’ll need to explicitly specify their location in a configuration file. For more information, see Chapter 6: R Versions of the RStudio Workbench Admin Guide.

Note: Version 3.3.0 is the minimum supported R version for Workbench.