text:
This is a guide to installation and administration for R.
This manual is for R, version (3.3.0).
Copyright © 2001–2014 R Core Team
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the R Core Team.
Sources, binaries and documentation for R can be obtained via CRAN, the "Comprehensive R Archive Network" whose current members are listed at https://CRAN.R-project.org/mirrors.html.
The simplest way is to download the most recent R-x.y.z.tar.gz file, and unpack it with
tar -xf R-x.y.z.tar.gz
on systems that have a suitable1
installed. On other systems you need to have the
program installed, when you can use
gzip -dc R-x.y.z.tar.gz | tar -xf -
The pathname of the directory into which the sources are unpacked should not
contain spaces, as most make
programs (and specifically
GNU make
) do not expect spaces.
If you want the build to be usable by a group of users, set umask
before unpacking so that the files will be readable by the target group
(e.g., umask 022
to be usable by all users). Keep this setting of
whilst building and installing.
If you use a recent GNU version of tar
and do this as a
root account (which on Windows includes accounts with administrator
privileges) you may see many warnings about changing ownership. In which
case you can use
tar --no-same-owner -xf R-x.y.z.tar.gz
and perhaps also include the option --no-same-permissions.
(These options can also be set in the TAR_OPTIONS
variable: if more than one option is included they should be separated by
A patched version of the current release, 'r-patched', and the current development version, 'r-devel', are available as daily tarballs and via access to the R Subversion repository. (For the two weeks prior to the release of a minor (3.x.0) version, 'r-patched' tarballs may refer to beta/release candidates of the upcoming release, the patched version of the current release being available via Subversion.)
The tarballs are available from https://stat.ethz.ch/R/daily. Download R-patched.tar.gz or R-devel.tar.gz (or the .tar.bz2 versions) and unpack as described in the previous section. They are built in exactly the same way as distributions of R releases.
Sources are also available via https://svn.R-project.org/R/, the R Subversion repository. If you have a Subversion client (see https://subversion.apache.org/), you can check out and update the current 'r-devel' from https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/ and the current 'r-patched' from 'https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-x-y-branch/' (where x and y are the major and minor number of the current released version of R). E.g., use
svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/ path
to check out 'r-devel' into directory path (which will be created if necessary). The alpha, beta and RC versions of an upcoming x.y.0 release are available from 'https://svn.r-project.org/R/branches/R-x-y-branch/' in the four-week period prior to the release.
Note that 'https:' is required2, and that the SSL certificate for the Subversion server of the R project should be recognized as from a trusted source.
Note that retrieving the sources by e.g. wget -r
or svn
from that URL will not work (and will give a error early in the
process): the Subversion information is needed to build R.
The Subversion repository does not contain the current sources for the
recommended packages, which can be obtained by rsync
or downloaded
from CRAN. To use rsync
to install the appropriate sources
for the recommended packages, run ./tools/rsync-recommended
from the
top-level directory of the R sources.
If downloading manually from CRAN, do ensure that you have the
correct versions of the recommended packages: if the number in the file
VERSION is 'x.y.z' you need to download the
contents of 'https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir', where
dir is 'x.y.z/Recommended' for r-devel or
x.y-patched/Recommended for r-patched, respectively, to
directory src/library/Recommended in the sources you have unpacked.
After downloading manually you need to execute
from the top level of the sources to make
the requisite links in src/library/Recommended. A suitable
incantation from the top level of the R sources using wget
be (for the correct value of dir)
wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A\*.gz -nd -P src/library/Recommended \ https://CRAN.R-project.org/src/contrib/dir ./tools/link-recommended
R will configure and build under most common Unix and Unix-alike platforms including 'cpu-*-linux-gnu' for the 'alpha', 'arm', 'hppa', 'ix86', 'm68k', 'mips', 'mipsel', 'powerpc', 's390', 'sparc', and 'x86_64' CPUs, 'x86_64-apple-darwin', 'i386-sun-solaris' and 'sparc-sun-solaris' as well as perhaps (it is tested less frequently on these platforms) 'i386-apple-darwin', 'i386-*-freebsd', 'x86_64-*-freebsd', 'i386-*-netbsd', 'x86_64/*-openbsd' and 'powerpc-ibm-aix6*'
In addition, binary distributions are available for some common Linux distributions and for OS X (formerly Mac OS). See the FAQ for current details. These are installed in platform-specific ways, so for the rest of this chapter we consider only building from the sources.
Cross-building is not possible: installing R builds a minimal version of R and then runs many R scripts to complete the build.
First review the essential and useful tools and libraries in Essential and useful other programs under a Unix-alike, and install those you
want or need. Ensure that the environment variable TMPDIR
is either
unset (and /tmp exists and can be written in and scripts can be
executed from) or points to the absolute path to a valid temporary directory
(one from which execution of scripts is allowed) which does not contain
Choose a directory to install the R tree (R is not just a binary, but has additional data sets, help files, font metrics etc). Let us call this place R_HOME. Untar the source code. This should create directories src, doc, and several more under a top-level directory: change to that top-level directory (At this point North American readers should consult Setting paper size.) Issue the following commands:
./configure make
(See Using make if your make is not called 'make'.) Users of Debian-based 64-bit systems4 may need
./configure LIBnn=lib make
Then check the built system works correctly by
make check
Failures are not necessarily problems as they might be caused by missing
functionality, but you should look carefully at any reported discrepancies.
(Some non-fatal errors are expected in locales that do not support Latin-1,
in particular in true C
locales and non-UTF-8 non-Western-European
locales.) A failure in tests/ok-errors.R may indicate inadequate
resource limits (see Running R).
More comprehensive testing can be done by
make check-devel
make check-all
see file tests/README and Testing a Unix-alike Installation for the possibilities of doing this in parallel. Note that these checks are only run completely if the recommended packages are installed.
If the command configure
and make
commands execute
successfully, a shell-script front-end called R will be created and
copied to R_HOME/bin. You can link or copy this script to a
place where users can invoke it, for example to /usr/local/bin/R.
You could also copy the man page R.1 to a place where your
reader finds it, such as /usr/local/man/man1. If you
want to install the complete R tree to, e.g., /usr/local/lib/R,
see Installation. Note: you do not need to install R: you
can run it from where it was built.
You do not necessarily have to build R in the top-level source directory (say, TOP_SRCDIR). To build in BUILDDIR, run
cd BUILDDIR TOP_SRCDIR/configure make
and so on, as described further below. This has the advantage of always
keeping your source tree clean and is particularly recommended when you work
with a version of R from Subversion. (You may need GNU
to allow this, and you will need no spaces in the path to the
build directory. It is unlikely to work if the source directory has
previously been used for a build.)
Now rehash
if necessary, type R, and read the R manuals and
the R FAQ (files FAQ or doc/manual/R-FAQ.html, or
https://CRAN.R-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html which always has
the version for the latest release of R).
Note: if you already have R installed, check that where you installed R replaces or comes earlier in your path than the previous installation. Some systems are set up to have /usr/bin (the standard place for a system installation) ahead of /usr/local/bin (the default place for installation of R) in their default path, and some do not have /usr/local/bin on the default path.
By default HTML help pages are created when needed rather than being built at install time.
If you need to disable the server and want HTML help, there is the option
to build HTML pages when packages are installed (including those
installed with R). This is enabled by the configure
--enable-prebuilt-html. Whether R CMD INSTALL
(and hence
) pre-builds HTML pages is determined by looking
at the R installation and is reported by R CMD INSTALL --help
it can be overridden by specifying one of the INSTALL
--html or --no-html.
The server is disabled by setting the environment variable
to a non-empty value, either before R is started or
within the R session before HTML help (including help.start
) is
used. It is also possible that system security measures will prevent the
server from being started, for example if the loopback interface has been
disabled. See ?tools::startDynamicHelp
for more details.
There is a set of manuals that can be built from the sources,
Printed versions of all the help pages for base and recommended packages (around 3500 pages).
Printed versions of the help pages for selected base packages (around 2000 pages)
"An Introduction to R".
"R Data Import/Export".
"R Installation and Administration", this manual.
"Writing R Extensions".
"The R Language Definition".
To make these (with 'fullrefman' rather than 'refman'), use
make pdf to create PDF versions make info to create info files (not 'refman' nor 'fullrefman').
You will not be able to build any of these unless you have
version 5.1 or later installed, and for PDF you must have
and texinfo.tex installed (which are part of the
GNU texinfo distribution but are, especially
texinfo.tex, often made part of the TeX package in
re-distributions). For historical reasons, the path to texi2any
can be set by macro 'MAKEINFO' in config.site
is nowadays a link to texi2any
The PDF versions can be viewed using any recent PDF viewer: they have
hyperlinks that can be followed. The info files are suitable for reading
online with Emacs or the standalone GNU info
The PDF versions will be created using the paper size selected at
configuration (default ISO a4): this can be overridden by setting
on the make
command line, or setting R_PAPERSIZE
in the
environment and using make -e
. (If re-making the manuals for a
different paper size, you should first delete the file
doc/manual/version.texi. The usual value for North America would be
There are some issues with making the PDF reference manual, fullrefman.pdf or refman.pdf. The help files contain both ISO Latin1 characters (e.g. in text.Rd) and upright quotes, neither of which are contained in the standard LaTeX Computer Modern fonts. We have provided four alternatives:
(The default.) Using standard PostScript fonts, Times Roman, Helvetica and
Courier. This works well both for on-screen viewing and for printing. One
disadvantage is that the Usage and Examples sections may come out rather
wide: this can be overcome by using in addition either of the options
(on a Unix-alike only if found by configure
) or
, which replace the Courier monospaced font by Inconsolata or
Bera Sans mono respectively. (You will need a recent version of the
appropriate LaTeX package inconsolata5 or bera
Note that in most LaTeX installations this will not actually use the standard fonts for PDF, but rather embed the URW clones NimbusRom, NimbusSans and (for Courier, if used) NimbusMon.
This needs LaTeX packages times, helvetic and (if used) courier installed.
Using the Latin Modern fonts. These are not often installed as part
of a TeX distribution, but can obtained from
https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/lm/ and
mirrors. This uses fonts rather similar to Computer Modern, but is not so
good on-screen as times
Using type-1 versions of the Computer Modern fonts by Vladimir Volovich. This is a large installation, obtainable from https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/ps-type1/cm-super/ and its mirrors. These type-1 fonts have poor hinting and so are nowhere near as readable on-screen as the other three options.
A package to use composites of Computer Modern fonts. This works well most of the time, and its PDF is more readable on-screen than the previous two options. There are three fonts for which it will need to use bitmapped fonts, tctt0900.600pk, tctt1000.600pk and tcrm1000.600pk. Unfortunately, if those files are not available, Acrobat Reader will substitute completely incorrect glyphs so you need to examine the logs carefully.
The default can be overridden by setting the environment variable
. (On Unix-alikes, this will be picked up at install time and
stored in etc/Renviron, but can still be overridden when the manuals
are built, using make -e
.) The usual6 default
value for R_RD4PDF
is 'times,inconsolata,hyper': omit
'hyper' if you do not want hyperlinks (e.g. for printing the manual)
or do not have LaTeX package hyperref, and omit 'inconsolata'
if you do not have LaTeX package inconsolata installed.
Further options, e.g for hyperref, can be included in a file Rd.cfg somewhere on your LaTeX search path. For example, if you prefer the text and not the page number in the table of contents to be hyperlinked use
to hyperlink both text and page number.
Ebook versions of most of the manuals in one or both of .epub and .mobi formats can be made by running in doc/manual one of
make ebooks make epub make mobi
This requires ebook-convert
from Calibre
(http://calibre-ebook.com/download), or from most Linux
distributions). If necessary the path to ebook-convert
can be set
as make macro EBOOK
to by editing doc/manual/Makefile (which
contains a commented value suitable for OS X).
To ensure that the installed tree is usable by the right group of users, set
appropriately (perhaps to '022') before unpacking the
sources and throughout the build process.
./configure make make check
(or, when building outside the source, TOP_SRCDIR/configure
etc) have been completed successfully, you can install the complete R
tree to your system by typing
make install
A parallel make can be used (but run make
before make
). Those using GNU make
4.0 or later may want to use
make -j n -O
to avoid interleaving of output.
This will install to the following directories:
the front-end shell script and other scripts and executables
the man page
all the rest (libraries, on-line help system, …). Here LIBnn is usually 'lib', but may be 'lib64' on some 64-bit Linux systems. This is known as the R home directory.
where prefix is determined during configuration (typically
/usr/local) and can be set by running configure
with the
option --prefix, as in
./configure --prefix=/where/you/want/R/to/go
where the value should be an absolute path. This causes make
to install the R script to /where/you/want/R/to/go/bin,
and so on. The prefix of the installation directories can be seen in the
status message that is displayed at the end of configure
. The
installation may need to be done by the owner of prefix, often
a root account.
You can install into another directory tree by using
make prefix=/path/to/here install
at least with GNU or Solaris make
(but not some older
Unix makes).
More precise control is available at configure time via options: see
configure --help
for details. (However, most of the 'Fine tuning
of the installation directories' options are not used by R.)
Configure options --bindir and --mandir are supported and
govern where a copy of the R
script and the man
page are
The configure option --libdir controls where the main R files are installed: the default is 'eprefix/LIBnn', where eprefix is the prefix used for installing architecture-dependent files, defaults to prefix, and can be set via the configure option --exec-prefix.
Each of bindir
, mandir
and libdir
can also be specified
on the make install
command line (at least for GNU
The configure
or make
variables rdocdir
can be used to install the system-independent doc
and share directories to somewhere other than libdir
. The C
header files can be installed to the value of rincludedir
: note that
as the headers are not installed into a subdirectory you probably want
something like rincludedir=/usr/local/include/R-(3.3.0)
If you want the R home to be something other than libdir/R, use rhome: for example
make install rhome=/usr/local/lib64/R-(3.3.0)
will use a version-specific R home on a non-Debian Linux 64-bit system.
If you have made R as a shared/static library you can install it in your system's library directory by
make prefix=/path/to/here install-libR
where prefix
is optional, and libdir
will give more precise
control.7 However, you should not install to a directory mentioned
in LDPATHS
(e.g. /usr/local/lib64) if you intend to work with
multiple versions of R, since that directory may be given precedence over
the lib directory of other R installations.
make install-strip
will install stripped executables, and on platforms where this is supported, stripped libraries in directories lib and modules and in the standard packages.
Note that installing R into a directory whose path contains spaces is not supported, and some aspects (such as installing source packages) will not work.
To install info and PDF versions of the manuals, use one or both of
make install-info make install-pdf
Once again, it is optional to specify prefix
, libdir
(the PDF manuals are installed under the R home directory).
(make install-info
needs Perl
installed if there is no
command install-info
on the system.)
More precise control is possible. For info, the setting used is that of
(default prefix/info, set by configure option
--infodir). The PDF files are installed into the R doc
tree, set by the make
variable rdocdir
A staged installation is possible, that it is installing R into a
temporary directory in order to move the installed tree to its final
destination. In this case prefix
(and so on) should reflect the
final destination, and DESTDIR
should be used: see
You can optionally install the run-time tests that are part of make
make install-tests
which populates a tests directory in the installation.
You can uninstall R by
make uninstall
optionally specifying prefix
etc in the same way as specified for
This will also uninstall any installed manuals. There are specific targets to uninstall info and PDF manuals in file doc/manual/Makefile.
Target uninstall-tests
will uninstall any installed tests, as well as
removing the directory tests containing the test results.
An installed shared/static libR
can be uninstalled by
make prefix=/path/to/here uninstall-libR
Some platforms can support closely related builds of R which can share all but the executables and dynamic objects. Examples include builds under Linux and Solaris for different CPUs or 32- and 64-bit builds.
R supports the idea of architecture-specific builds, specified by adding
'r_arch=name' to the configure
line. Here name
can be anything non-empty, and is used to name subdirectories of lib,
etc, include and the package libs subdirectories.
Example names from other software are the use of sparcv9 on Sparc
Solaris and 32 by gcc
on 'x86_64' Linux.
If you have two or more such builds you can install them over each other (and for 32/64-bit builds on one architecture, one build can be done without 'r_arch'). The space savings can be considerable: on 'x86_64' Linux a basic install (without debugging symbols) took 74Mb, and adding a 32-bit build added 6Mb. If you have installed multiple builds you can select which build to run by
R --arch=name
and just running 'R' will run the last build that was installed.
will detect if more than one build is installed and try
to install packages with the appropriate library objects for each. This
will not be done if the package has an executable configure
script or
a src/Makefile file. In such cases you can install for extra builds
R --arch=name CMD INSTALL --libs-only pkg1 pkg2 …
If you want to mix sub-architectures compiled on different platforms (for example 'x86_64' Linux and 'i686' Linux), it is wise to use explicit names for each, and you may also need to set libdir to ensure that they install into the same place.
When sub-architectures are used the version of Rscript
in e.g.
/usr/bin will be the last installed, but architecture-specific
versions will be available in e.g.
/usr/lib64/R/bin/exec${R_ARCH}. Normally all installed
architectures will run on the platform so the architecture of
itself does not matter. The executable Rscript
will run the R
script, and at that time the
setting of the R_ARCH
environment variable determines the architecture
which is run.
When running post-install tests with sub-architectures, use
R --arch=name CMD make check[-devel|all]
to select a sub-architecture to check.
Sub-architectures are also used on Windows, but by selecting executables
within the appropriate bin directory, R_HOME/bin/i386 or
R_HOME/bin/x64. For backwards compatibility with R <
2.12.0, there are executables R_HOME/bin/R.exe or
R_HOME/bin/Rscript.exe: these will run an executable from one
of the subdirectories, which one being taken first from the
environment variable, then from the --arch
command-line option8 and finally from the installation default (which
is 32-bit for a combined 32/64 bit R installation).
On Linux9, there is an alternative mechanism for mixing 32-bit and 64-bit
libraries known as multilib. If a Linux distribution supports
multilib, then parallel builds of R may be installed in the
sub-directories lib (32-bit) and lib64 (64-bit). The build to
be run may then be selected using the setarch
command. For
example, a 32-bit build may be run by
setarch i686 R
The setarch
command is only operational if both 32-bit and 64-bit
builds are installed. If there is only one installation of R, then this
will always be run regardless of the architecture specified by the
There can be problems with installing packages on the non-native
architecture. It is a good idea to run e.g. setarch i686 R
sessions in which packages are to be installed, even if that is the only
version of R installed (since this tells the package installation code
the architecture needed).
At present there is a potential problem with packages using Java, as the post-install for a 'i686' RPM on 'x86_64' Linux reconfigures Java and will find the 'x86_64' Java. If you know where a 32-bit Java is installed you may be able to run (as root)
export JAVA_HOME=<path to jre directory of 32-bit Java> setarch i686 R CMD javareconf
to get a suitable setting.
When this mechanism is used, the version of Rscript
in e.g.
/usr/bin will be the last installed, but an architecture-specific
version will be available in e.g. /usr/lib64/R/bin. Normally all
installed architectures will run on the platform so the architecture of
does not matter.
There are many other installation options, most of which are listed by
configure --help
. Almost all of those not listed elsewhere in
this manual are either standard autoconf
options not relevant to
R or intended for specialist uses by the R developers.
One that may be useful when working on R itself is the option
--disable-byte-compiled-packages, which ensures that the base and
recommended packages are lazyloaded but not byte-compiled. (Alternatively
the (make or environment) variable R_NO_BASE_COMPILE
can be set to a
non-empty value for the duration of the build.)
Option --with-internal-tzcode makes use of R's own code and copy
of the Olson database for managing timezones. This will be preferred where
there are issues with the system implementation, usually involving times
after 2037 or before 1916. An alternative time-zone directory10 can be used, pointed to
by environment variable TZDIR
: this should contain files such as
Europe/London. On all tested OSes the system timezone was deduced
correctly, but if necessary it can be set as the value of environment
variable TZ
By default configure
searches for suitable options11 for
OpenMP support for the C, C++98, FORTRAN 77 and Fortran compilers.
Only the C result is currently used for R itself, and only if
were not specified. This can be overridden
by specifying
Use for packages has similar restrictions (involving SHLIB_LD
similar: note that as FORTRAN 77 code is normally linked by the C compiler,
both need to support OpenMP) and can be overridden by specifying some of
Setting to an empty value will disable OpenMP for that compiler (and
configuring with --disable-openmp will disable all detection of
OpenMP). Note that the configure
detection test is to compile and
link a standalone OpenMP program, which is not the same as compiling a
shared object and loading it into the C program of R's executable. Note
that overridden values are not tested.
Full testing is possible only if the test files have been installed with
make install-tests
which populates a tests directory in the installation.
If this has been done, two testing routes are available. The first is to
move to the home directory of the R installation (as given by
) and run
cd tests ## followed by one of ../bin/R CMD make check ../bin/R CMD make check-devel ../bin/R CMD make check-all
and other useful targets are test-BasePackages
to the run tests of the standard and recommended
packages (if installed) respectively.
This re-runs all the tests relevant to the installed R (including for example code in the package vignettes), but not for example the ones checking the example code in the manuals nor making the standalone Rmath library. This can occasionally be useful when the operating environment has been changed, for example by OS updates or by substituting the BLAS (see Shared BLAS).
Parallel checking of packages may be possible: set the environment variable
to the maximum number of processes to be run in
parallel. This affects both checking the package examples (part of
make check
) and package sources (part of make
and make check-recommended
). It does require a
command which supports the make -j n
most do but on Solaris you need to select GNU make
or dmake
Where parallel checking of package sources is done, a log file
pngname.log is left in the tests
directory for
Alternatively, the installed R can be run, preferably with --vanilla. Then
Sys.setenv(LC_COLLATE = "C", LC_TIME = "C", LANGUAGE = "en") library("tools") testInstalledBasic("both") testInstalledPackages(scope = "base") testInstalledPackages(scope = "recommended")
runs the basic tests and then all the tests on the standard and recommended packages. These tests can be run from anywhere: the basic tests write their results in the tests folder of the R home directory and run fewer tests than the first approach: in particular they do not test things which need Internet access—that can be tested by
(On Windows that runs the tests using whichever of internal or WinInet
internet functions has been selected for that session: to test both run this
twice selecting both options using setInternet2
These tests work best if diff
(in Rtools*.exe for Windows
users) is in the path.
It is possible to test the installed packages (but not their
package-specific tests) by testInstalledPackages
even if
make install-tests
was not run.
Note that the results may depend on the language set for times and messages: for maximal similarity to reference results you may want to try setting (before starting the R session)
and use a UTF-8 or Latin-1 locale.
The bin/windows directory of a CRAN site contains binaries for a base distribution and a large number of add-on packages from CRAN to run on 32- or 64-bit Windows (XP or later) on 'ix86' and 'x86_64' CPUs.
Your file system must allow long file names (as is likely except perhaps for some network-mounted systems).
Installation is via the installer (3.3.0)-win.exe. Just double-click on the icon and follow the instructions. When installing on a 64-bit version of Windows the options will include 32- or 64-bit versions of R (and the default is to install both). You can uninstall R from the Control Panel.
Note that you will be asked to choose a language for installation, and that choice applies to both installation and un-installation but not to running R itself.
See the R Windows FAQ for more details on the binary installer.
R can be built as either a 32-bit or 64-bit application on Windows: to build the 64-bit application you need a 64-bit edition of Windows: such an OS can also be used to build 32-bit R.
The standard installer combines 32-bit and 64-bit builds into a single executable which can then be installed into the same location and share all the files except the .exe and .dll files and some configuration files in the etc directory.
Building is only tested in a 8-bit locale: using a multi-byte locale (as used for CJK languages) is unsupported and may not work (the scripts do try to select a 'C' locale; Windows may not honour this).
NB: The build process is currently being changed to require
external binary distributions of third-party software. Their location is
set using macro EXT_LIBS
with default setting $(LOCAL_SOFT);
the $(LOCAL_SOFT) macro defaults to $(R_HOME)/extsoft. This
directory can be populated using make rsync-extsoft
. The location
can be overridden by setting EXT_LIBS
to a different path in
src/gnuwin32/MkRules.local. A suitable collection of files can also
be obtained from https://CRAN.R-project.org/bin/windows/extsoft
or https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/libs.html.
If you want to build R from the sources, you will first need to collect, install and test an extensive set of tools. See The Windows toolset (and perhaps updates in https://CRAN.R-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/) for details.
The Rtools*.exe executable installer described in The Windows toolset also includes some source files in addition to the R source as
noted below. You should run it first, to obtain a working tar
other necessities. Choose a "Full installation", and install the extra
files into your intended R source directory, e.g. C:/R. The
directory name should not contain spaces. We will call this directory
R_HOME below.
You need to collect the following sets of files:
tar -xf R-(3.3.0).tar.gz
to create the source tree in R_HOME. Beware: do use
to extract the sources rather than tools such as WinZip. If
you are using an account with administrative privileges you may get a lot of
messages which can be suppressed by
tar --no-same-owner -xf R-(3.3.0).tar.gz
or perhaps better, set the environment variable TAR_OPTIONS
to the
value '--no-same-owner --no-same-permissions'.
It is also possible to obtain the source code using Subversion; see Obtaining R for details.
. If you have an Internet connection, you can do this
automatically by running in R_HOME/src/gnuwin32
make rsync-recommended
create an empty directory, say c:/R/extsoft, and unpack it in that directory by e.g.
unzip local320.zip -d c:/R/extsoft
cd R_HOME/src/gnuwin32 cp MkRules.dist MkRules.local
and edit MkRules.local, uncommenting EXT_LIBS
and setting it
to the appropriate path (in our example c:/R/extsoft).
Look through the file MkRules.local and make any other changes needed: in particular, this is where a 64-bit build is selected and the locations are set of external software for ICU collation and the cairo-based devices.
The following additional item is normally installed by Rtools31.exe. If instead you choose to do a completely manual build you will also need
Set the environment variable TMPDIR
to the absolute path to a writable
directory, with a path specified with forward slashes and no spaces. (The
default is /tmp, which may not be useful on Windows.)
You may need to compile under a case-honouring file system: we found that a
-mounted file system (which maps all file names to lower
case) did not work.
Open a command window at R_HOME/src/gnuwin32, then run
make all recommended vignettes
and sit back and wait while the basic compile takes place.
make -j4 all make -j4 recommended make vignettes
but this is only likely to be worthwhile on a multi-core machine with ample memory, and is not 100% reliable.
to a non-empty value, which
inhibits the byte-compilation of the base and recommended packages.
The devices based on cairographics (svg
, cairo_pdf
and the type = "cairo"
versions of png
, tiff
and bmp
) are implemented in a separate DLL
winCairo.dll which is loaded when one of these devices is first
used. It is not built by default, and needs to be built (after
make all
) by make cairodevices
To enable the building of these devices you need to install the static cairographics libraries built by Simon Urbanek at https://www.rforge.net/Cairo/files/cairo-current-win.tar.gz. Set the macro 'CAIRO_HOME' in MkRules.local. (Note that this tarball unpacks with a top-level directory src/: 'CAIRO_HOME' needs to include that directory in its path.)
It is recommended to build R to support ICU (International Components for Unicode, http://site.icu-project.org/) for collation, as is commonly done on Unix-alikes.
Two settings are needed in MkRules.local,
# set to use ICU # USE_ICU = YES # path to parent of ICU headers ICU_PATH = /path/to/ICU
The first should be uncommented and the second set to the top-level
directory of a suitably packaged binary build of ICU, for example that at
https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/goodies/ICU_531.zip. Depending
on the build, it may be necessary to edit the macro ICU_LIBS
Unlike on a Unix-alike, it is normally necessary to call
to set a locale before ICU is actually used for
collation, or set the environment variable R_ICU_LOCALE
version 7.28.0 or later can be used to support
and the "libcurl"
methods of
and url
A suitable distribution can be found via https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/libs.html and its unpacked location should be specified in file MkRules.local.
For secure use of e.g. 'https://' URLs Windows users may need to
specify the path to up-to-date CA root certificates: see
You can test a build by running
make check
The recommended packages can be checked by
make check-recommended
Other levels of checking are
make check-devel
for a more thorough check of the R functionality, and
make check-all
for both check-devel
and check-recommended
If a test fails, there will almost always be a .Rout.fail file in the directory being checked (often tests/Examples or tests): examine the file to help pinpoint the problem.
Parallel checking of package sources (part of make check-devel
make check-recommended
) is possible: see the environment variable
to the maximum number of processes to be run in
The PDF manuals require texinfo 5.1 or later, and can be made by
make manuals
If you want to make the info versions (not including the Reference Manual), use
cd ../../doc/manual make -f Makefile.win info
(all assuming you have pdftex
installed and in
your path).
See the Making the manuals section in the Unix-alike section for setting options such as the paper size and the fonts used.
By default it is assumed that texinfo is not installed, and the
manuals will not be built. The comments in file MkRules.dist
describe settings to build them. (Copy that file to MkRules.local
and edit it.) The texinfo 5.x package for use on Windows is available
at https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/: you will also need to
install Perl
You need to have the files for a complete R build, including bitmap and Tcl/Tk support and the manuals (which requires texinfo installed), as well as the recommended packages and Inno Setup (see The Inno Setup installer).
Once everything is set up
make distribution make check-all
will make all the pieces and the installer and put them in the gnuwin32/cran subdirectory, then check the build. This works by building all the parts in the sequence:
rbuild (the executables, the FAQ docs etc.)
rpackages (the base packages)
htmldocs (the HTML documentation)
cairodevices (the cairo-based graphics devices)
recommended (the recommended packages)
vignettes (the vignettes in base packages:
only needed if building from an svn
manuals (the PDF manuals)
rinstaller (the install program)
crandir (the CRAN distribution directory, only for 64-bit builds)
The parts can be made individually if a full build is not needed, but
earlier parts must be built before later ones. (The Makefile doesn't
enforce this dependency—some build targets force a lot of computation even
if all files are up to date.) The first four targets are the default build
if just make
(or make all
) is run.
Parallel make is not supported and likely to fail.
If you want to customize the installation by adding extra packages, replace
make rinstaller
by something like
make rinstaller EXTRA_PKGS='pkg1 pkg2 pkg3'
An alternative way to customize the installer starting with a binary distribution is to first make an installation of R from the standard installer, then add packages and make other customizations to that installation. Then (after having customized file MkRules, possibly via MkRules.local, and having made R in the source tree) in src/gnuwin32/installer run
make myR IMAGEDIR=rootdir
where rootdir is the path to the root of the customized installation (in double quotes if it contains spaces or backslashes).
Both methods create an executable with a standard name such as (3.3.0)-win.exe, so please rename it to indicate that it is customized. If you intend to distribute a customized installer please do check that license requirements are met – note that the installer will state that the contents are distributed under GPL and this has a requirement for you to supply the complete sources (including the R sources even if you started with a binary distribution of R, and also the sources of any extra packages (including their external software) which are included).
The defaults for the startup parameters may also be customized. For example
make myR IMAGEDIR=rootdir MDISDI=1
will create an installer that defaults to installing R to run in SDI mode. See src/gnuwin32/installer/Makefile for the names and values that can be set.
The standard CRAN distribution of a 32/64-bit installer is made by first building 32-bit R (just
make 32-bit
is needed), and then (in a separate directory) building 64-bit R with the
macro HOME32
set in file MkRules.local to the top-level
directory of the 32-bit build. Then the make rinstaller
copies the files that differ between architectures from the 32-bit build as
it builds the installer image.
It is also possible to build an installer for use with Microsoft Installer. This is intended for use by sysadmins doing automated installs, and is not recommended for casual use.
It makes use of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolkit version 3.5 (or perhaps later, untested) available from http://wixtoolset.org/. Once WiX is installed, set the path to its home directory in MkRules.local.
You need to have the files for a complete R build, including bitmap and Tcl/Tk support and the manuals, as well as the recommended packages. There is no option in the installer to customize startup options, so edit etc/Rconsole and etc/Rprofile.site to set these as required. Then
cd installer make msi
which will result in a file with a name like
(3.3.0)-win32.msi. This can be double-clicked to be
installed, but those who need it will know what to do with it (usually by
running msiexec /i
with additional options). Properties that
users might want to set from the msiexec
command line include
'ALLUSERS', 'INSTALLDIR' (something like c:\Program
Files\R\(3.3.0)) and 'RMENU' (the path to the 'R'
folder on the start menu) and 'STARTDIR' (the starting directory for
R shortcuts, defaulting to something like
The MSI installer can be built both from a 32-bit build of R
((3.3.0)-win32.msi) and from a 64-bit build of R
((3.3.0)-win64.msi, optionally including 32-bit files by
setting the macro HOME32
, when the name is
(3.3.0)-win.msi). Unlike the main installer, a 64-bit MSI
installer can only be run on 64-bit Windows.
Thanks to David del Campo (Dept of Statistics, University of Oxford) for suggesting WiX and building a prototype installer.
To build a 64-bit version of R you need a 64-bit toolchain: the only one discussed here is based on the work of the MinGW-w64 project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/, but commercial compilers such as those from Intel and PGI could be used (and have been by R redistributors).
Support for MinGW-w64 was developed in the R sources over the period 2008–10 and was first released as part of R 2.11.0. The assistance of Yu Gong at a crucial step in porting R to MinGW-w64 is gratefully acknowledged, as well as help from Kai Tietz, the lead developer of the MinGW-w64 project.
Windows 64-bit is now completely integrated into the R and package build systems: a 64-bit build is selected in file MkRules.local.
The Windows installer contains a set of test files used when building R.
The Rtools
are not needed to run these tests. but more comprehensive
analysis of errors will be given if diff
is in the path (and
errorsAreFatal = FALSE
is then not needed below).
Launch either Rgui
or Rterm
, preferably with
--vanilla. Then run
Sys.setenv(LC_COLLATE = "C", LANGUAGE = "en") library("tools") testInstalledBasic("both") testInstalledPackages(scope = "base", errorsAreFatal = FALSE) testInstalledPackages(scope = "recommended", errorsAreFatal = FALSE)
runs the basic tests and then all the tests on the standard and recommended
packages. These tests can be run from anywhere: they write some of their
results in the tests folder of the R home directory (as given by
), and hence may need to be run under the account used to
install R.
The results of example(md5sums)
when testing tools will differ
from the reference output as some files are installed with Windows' CRLF
line endings.
The front page of a CRAN site has a link 'Download R for OS X'. Click on that, then download the file R-(3.3.0).pkg and install it. This runs on OS X 10.9 and later (Mavericks, Yosemite …13).
Installers for R-patched and R-devel are usually available from https://r.research.att.com.
For some older versions of the OS you can in principle (it is little tested) install R from the sources.
It is important that if you use a binary installer package that your OS is fully updated: look at 'Updates' from the 'App Store' to be sure. (If using XQuartz, check that is current.)
To install, just double-click on the icon of the file you downloaded. At the 'Installation Type' stage, note the option to 'Customize'. This currently shows four components: everyone will need the 'R Framework' component: the remaining components are optional. (The 'Tcl/Tk' component is needed to use package tcltk. The 'Texinfo' component is only needed by those installing source packages.)
This is an Apple Installer package. If you encounter any problem during the installation, please check the Installer log by clicking on the "Window" menu and item "Installer Log". The full output (select "Show All Log") is useful for tracking down problems. Note the the installer is clever enough to try to upgrade the last-installed version of the application where you installed it (which may not be where you want this time …).
Various parts of the build require XQuartz to be installed: : see
https://xquartz.macosforge.org/. These include the tcltk
package and the X11
device: attempting to use these without XQuartz
will remind you.
If you update your OS X version, you should re-install R (and XQuartz): the installer tailors the installation to the current version of the OS.
For building R from source, see OS X.
There are two ways to run R on OS X from a CRAN binary distribution.
There is a GUI console normally installed with the R icon in /Applications which you can run by double-clicking (e.g. from Launchpad or Finder). (If you cannot find there it was possibly installed elsewhere so try searching for it in Spotlight.) This is usually referred to as R.APP to distinguish it from command-line R: its user manual is currently part of the OS X FAQ at https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html and can be viewed from R.APP's 'Help' menu.
You can run command-line R from a Terminal14 like any other Unix-alike: see the next chapter of this manual. There are some small differences which may surprise users of R on other platforms, notably the default location of the personal library directory (under ~/Library/R, e.g. ~/Library/R/3.3/library), and that warnings, messages and other output to stderr are highlighted in bold.
It has been reported that running R.APP under Yosemite may fail if no preferences are stored, so if it fails when launched for the very first time, try it again (the first attempt will store some preferences).
Users of R.APP need to be aware of the 'App Nap' feature (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_9.html) which can cause R tasks to appear to run very slowly when not producing output in the console. Here are three ways to avoid it:
defaults write org.R-project.R NSAppSleepDisabled -bool YES
(see https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/releasenotes/MacOSX/WhatsNewInOSX/Articles/MacOSX10_9.html).
Using the X11
device or the X11-based versions of View()
for data frames and matrices (the latter are the default for
command-line R but not R.APP) requires an X sub-system to be installed:
see OS X. (As do the tcltk package and some third-party
R for OS X consists of two parts: the GUI (R.APP) and the R framework. The un-installation is as simple as removing those folders (e.g. by dragging them into the Trash). The typical installation will install the GUI into the /Applications/R.app folder and the R framework into the /Library/Frameworks/R.framework folder. The links to R and Rscript in /usr/bin (or /usr/local/bin from El Capitan) should also be removed.15
If you want to get rid of R more completely using a Terminal, simply run
(prepend sudo
if needed):
rm -rf /Library/Frameworks/R.framework /Applications/R.app \ /usr/bin/R /usr/bin/Rscript
The installation consisted of four Apple packages:
, org.r-project.R.x86_64.GUI.pkg
(not all of which need be
installed). You can use pkgutil --forget
if you want the Apple
Installer to forget about the package without deleting its files (useful for
the R framework when installing multiple R versions in parallel), or
after you have deleted the files.
Uninstalling the Tcl/Tk or Texinfo components (which are installed under /usr/local) is not simple. You can list the files they installed in a Terminal by
pkgutil --files org.r-project.x86_64.tcltk.x11 pkgutil --files org.r-project.x86_64.texinfo
These are paths relative to /, the root of the file system.
The installer will remove any previous version of the R framework which
it finds installed. This can be avoided by using pkgutil --forget
(see the previous section). However, note that different versions are
installed under /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions as
3.2, 3.3 and so on, so it is not possible to have different
'3.x.y' versions installed for the same 'x'.
A version of R can be run directly from the command-line as e.g.
However, R.APP will always run the 'current' version, that is the last
installed version. A small utility, Rswitch.app
(available at
https://r.research.att.com/#other), can be used to change the
'current' version. This is of limited use as R.APP is compiled against a
particular version of R and will likely crash if switched to an earlier
version. This may allow you to install a development version of R
(de-selecting R.APP) and then switch back to the release version.
How to start R and what command-line options are available is discussed in Invoking R in An Introduction to R.
You should ensure that the shell has set adequate resource limits: R
expects a stack size of at least 8MB and to be able to open at least 256
file descriptors. (Any modern OS should have default limits at least as
large as these, but apparently NetBSD may not. Use the shell command
) or limit
) to check.)
R makes use of a number of environment variables, the default values of
many of which are set in file R_HOME/etc/Renviron (there are
none set by default on Windows and hence no such file). These are set at
time, and you would not normally want to
change them – a possible exception is R_PAPERSIZE
(see Setting paper size). The paper size will be deduced from the 'LC_PAPER'
locale category if it exists and R_PAPERSIZE
is unset, and this will
normally produce the right choice from 'a4' and 'letter' on modern
Unix-alikes (but can always be overridden by setting R_PAPERSIZE
Various environment variables can be set to determine where R creates its
per-session temporary directory. The environment variables
and TEMP
are searched in turn and the first
one which is set and points to a writable area is used. If none do, the
final default is /tmp on Unix-alikes and the value of
on Windows. The path should be an absolute path not containing
spaces (and it is best to avoid non-alphanumeric characters such as
Some Unix-alike systems are set up to remove files and directories
periodically from /tmp, for example by a cron
running tmpwatch
. Set TMPDIR
to another directory before
starting long-running jobs on such a system.
Note that TMPDIR
will be used to execute configure
when installing packages, so if /tmp has been mounted as
'noexec', TMPDIR
needs to be set to a directory from which
execution is allowed.
It is helpful to use the correct terminology. A package is loaded
from a library by the function library()
. Thus a library is a
directory containing installed packages; the main library is
R_HOME/library, but others can be used, for example by
setting the environment variable R_LIBS
or using the R function
The set of packages loaded on startup is by default
> getOption("defaultPackages") [1] "datasets" "utils" "grDevices" "graphics" "stats" "methods"
(plus, of course, base) and this can be changed by setting the option
in startup code (e.g. in ~/.Rprofile). It is initially
set to the value of the environment variable R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES
if set
(as a comma-separated list). Setting R_DEFAULT_PACKAGES=NULL
that only package base is loaded.
Changing the set of default packages is normally used to reduce the set for
speed when scripting: in particular not using methods will reduce the
start-up time by a factor of up to two (and this is done by
). But it can also be used to customize R, e.g. for
class use.
R packages are installed into libraries, which are directories in the file system containing a subdirectory for each package installed there.
R comes with a single library, R_HOME/library which is the value of the R object '.Library' containing the standard and recommended16 packages. Both sites and users can create others and make use of them (or not) in an R session. At the lowest level '.libPaths()' can be used to add paths to the collection of libraries or to report the current collection.
R will automatically make use of a site-specific library
R_HOME/site-library if this exists (it does not in a vanilla
R installation). This location can be overridden by setting17 '.Library.site' in
R_HOME/etc/Rprofile.site, or (not recommended) by setting the
environment variable R_LIBS_SITE
. Like '.Library', the site
libraries are always included by '.libPaths()'.
Users can have one or more libraries, normally specified by the environment
variable R_LIBS_USER
. This has a default value (to see it, use
'Sys.getenv("R_LIBS_USER")' within an R session), but that is only
used if the corresponding directory actually exists (which by default it
will not).
Both R_LIBS_USER
and R_LIBS_SITE
can specify multiple library
paths, separated by colons (semicolons on Windows).
Packages may be distributed in source form or compiled binary form. Installing source packages which contain C/C++/Fortran code requires that compilers and related tools be installed. Binary packages are platform-specific and generally need no special tools to install, but see the documentation for your platform for details.
Note that you may need to specify implicitly or explicitly the library to which the package is to be installed. This is only an issue if you have more than one library, of course.
Ensure that the environment variable TMPDIR
is either unset (and
/tmp exists and can be written in and executed from) or is the
absolute path to a valid temporary directory, not containing spaces.
For most users it suffices to call 'install.packages(pkgname)' or its GUI equivalent if the intention is to install a CRAN package and internet access is available.18 On most systems 'install.packages()' will allow packages to be selected from a list box (typically with several thousand items).
To install packages from source on a Unix-alike use in a terminal
R CMD INSTALL -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 …
The part '-l /path/to/library' can be omitted, in which case the first
library of a normal R session is used (that shown by
There are a number of options available: use R CMD INSTALL --help
see the current list.
Alternatively, packages can be downloaded and installed from within R.
First choose your nearest CRAN mirror using
. Then download and install packages pkg1
and pkg2 by
> install.packages(c("pkg1", "pkg2"))
The essential dependencies of the specified packages will also be fetched.
Unless the library is specified (argument lib
) the first library in
the library search path is used: if this is not writable, R will ask the
user (in an interactive session) if the default personal library should be
created, and if allowed to will install the packages there.
If you want to fetch a package and all those it depends on (in any way) that are not already installed, use e.g.
> install.packages("Rcmdr", dependencies = TRUE)
can install a source package from a local
.tar.gz file (or a URL to such a file) by setting argument
to NULL
: this will be selected automatically if the name
given is a single .tar.gz file.
can look in several repositories, specified as a
character vector by the argument repos
: these can include a
CRAN mirror, Bioconductor, Omegahat, R-forge, rforge.net, local
archives, local files, …). Function setRepositories()
select amongst those repositories that the R installation is aware of.
Naive users sometimes forget that as well as installing a package, they have
to use library
to make its functionality available.
What install.packages
does by default is different on Unix-alikes
(except OS X) and Windows. On Unix-alikes it consults the list of available
source packages on CRAN (or other repository/ies),
downloads the latest version of the package sources, and installs them (via
). On Windows it looks (by default) first at the list
of binary versions of packages available for your version of R and
downloads the latest versions (if any). If no binary version is available
or the source version is newer, it will install the source versions of
packages without compiled C/C++/Fortran code, and offer to do so for those
with, if make
is available (and this can be tuned by option
On Windows install.packages
can also install a binary package from a
local zip file (or the URL of such a file) by setting argument
to NULL
. Rgui.exe
has a menu Packages
with a GUI interface to install.packages
, update.packages
Windows binary packages for R are distributed as a single binary containing either or both architectures (32- and 64-bit).
A few of the binary packages need other software to be installed on your system: see for example https://CRAN.R-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/3.2/@ReadMe. Packages using Gtk+ (Cairo, RGtk2, cairoDevice and those that depend on them) need the bin directory of a bundled distribution of Gtk2 from http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php or http://www.gtk.org/download/win64.php in the path: it should work to have both 32- and 64-bit Gtk+ bin directories in the path on a 64-bit version of R.
works in Windows to install source packages. No
additional tools are needed if the package does not contain compiled code,
and install.packages(type="source")
will work for such packages (and
for those with compiled code if the tools (see The Windows toolset)
are in the path). We have seen occasional permission problems after
unpacking source packages on some systems: these have been circumvented by
setting the environment variable R_INSTALL_TAR
to 'tar.exe'.
If you have only a source package that is known to work with current R and just want a binary Windows build of it, you could make use of the building service offered at http://win-builder.r-project.org/.
For almost all packages R CMD INSTALL
will attempt to install both
32- and 64-bit builds of a package if run from a 32/64-bit install of R.
It will report success if the installation of the architecture of the
running R
succeeded, whether or not the other architecture was
successfully installed. The exceptions are packages with a non-empty
configure.win script or which make use of src/Makefile.win.
If configure.win does something appropriate to both architectures
use19 option
--force-biarch: otherwise R CMD INSTALL --merge-multiarch
can be applied to a source tarball to merge separate 32- and 64-bit
installs. (This can only be applied to a tarball, and will only succeed if
both installs succeed.)
If you have a package without compiled code and no Windows-specific help, you can zip up an installation on another OS and install from that zip file on Windows. However, such a package can be installed from the sources on Windows without any additional tools.
There is provision to make use of a system-wide library of installed
external software by setting the make
variable LOCAL_SOFT
to give an equivalent of /usr/local on a Unix-alike. This can be set
in src/gnuwin/MkRules.local when R is built from sources (see the
comments in src/gnuwin/MkRules.dist), or in file20 etc/i386/Makeconf or etc/x64/Makeconf for
an installed version of R. The version used by CRAN can be
installed as described in Building from source.
On OS X install.packages
works as it does on other Unix-alike
systems, but there are additional types starting with mac.binary
(available for the CRAN distribution but not when compiling from
source: mac.binary.mavericks
for a 'Mavericks' build with
a synonym for the appropriate variant) which can be passed
to install.packages
in order to download and install binary packages
from a suitable repository. These OS X binary package files have the
extension '.tgz'. The R.APP GUI provides menus for installation of
either binary or source packages, from CRAN or local files.
On R builds using binary packages, the default is type both
: this
looks first at the list of binary packages available for your version of
R and installs the latest versions (if any). If no binary version is
available or the source version is newer, it will install the source
versions of packages without compiled C/C++/Fortran code and offer to do so
for those with, if make
is available.
Note that most binary packages including compiled code are tied to a particular series (e.g. R 3.2.x or 3.3.x) of R.
Installing source packages which do not contain compiled code should work
with no additional tools. For others you will need the 'Command Line Tools'
for Xcode
and compilers which match those used to build R: see
Package rJava and those which depend on it need a Java runtime installed and several packages need X11 installed, including those using Tk. See OS X and Java (OS X).
Tcl/Tk extensions BWidget
and Tktable
are part of the Tcl/Tk
contained in the R installer. These are required by a number of
CRAN and Bioconductor packages.
A few of the binary packages need other software to be installed on your system. In particular packages using Gtk+ (RGtk2, cairoDevice and those that depend on them) need the GTK framework installed from https://r.research.att.com/libs/: the appropriate version at the time of writing was https://r.research.att.com/libs/GTK_2.24.17-X11.pkg
The default compilers specified in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/etc/Makeconf depend on the version of OS X under which R was installed, and are appropriate to the latest version of the command-line tools for that version of OS X. The settings can be changed, either by editing that file or in a file such as ~/.R/Makevars (see the next section). Entries which may need to be changed include 'CC', 'CXX', 'FC', 'F77', 'FLIBS' and the corresponding flags, and perhaps 'CXXCPP', 'DYLIB_LD', 'MAIN_LD', 'SHLIB_CXXLD', 'SHLIB_FCLD' and 'SHLIB_LD'.
So for example you could select clang
for both C and C++ with
extensive checking by having in ~/.R/Makevars
CC=clang CXX=clang++ CFLAGS=-mtune=native -g -O2 -Wall -pedantic -Wconversion CXXFLAGS=-mtune=native -g -O2 -Wall -pedantic -Wconversion
and for a version of gfortran-4.2
we needed
The R system and package-specific compilation flags can be overridden or
added to by setting the appropriate Make variables in the personal file
HOME/.R/Makevars-R_PLATFORM (but
HOME/.R/Makevars.win or HOME/.R/Makevars.win64 on
Windows), or if that does not exist, HOME/.R/Makevars, where
'R_PLATFORM' is the platform for which R was built, as available in the
component of the R variable R.version
. An
alternative personal file can be specified via the environment
variable R_MAKEVARS_USER
Package developers are encouraged to use this mechanism to enable a reasonable amount of diagnostic messaging ("warnings") when compiling, such as e.g. -Wall -pedantic for tools from GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection.
Note that this mechanism can also be used when it necessary to change the optimization level for a particular package. For example
## for C code CFLAGS=-g -O -mtune=native ## for C++ code CXXFLAGS=-g -O -mtune=native ## for Fortran code FFLAGS=-g -O -mtune=native ## for Fortran 9x code FCFLAGS=-g -O -mtune=native
There is also provision for a site-wide Makevars.site file under
R_HOME/etc (in a sub-architecture-specific directory if
appropriate). This is read immediately after Makeconf, and an
alternative file can be specified by environment variable
When installing packages from their sources, there are some extra considerations on installations which use sub-architectures. These are commonly used on Windows but can in principle be used on other platforms.
When a source package is installed by a build of R which supports multiple sub-architectures, the normal installation process installs the packages for all sub-architectures. The exceptions are
where there is an configure script, or a file src/Makefile.
where there is a non-empty configure.win script, or a file src/Makefile.win (with some exceptions where the package is known to have an architecture-independent configure.win, or if --force-biarch or field 'Biarch' in the DESCRIPTION file is used to assert so).
In those cases only the current architecture is installed. Further sub-architectures can be installed by
R CMD INSTALL --libs-only pkg
using the path to R
or R --arch
to select the additional
sub-architecture. There is also R CMD INSTALL --merge-multiarch
to build and merge the two architectures, starting with a source tarball.
The base and recommended packages are byte-compiled by default. Other
packages can be byte-compiled on installation by using R CMD
with option --byte-compile or by
install.packages(type = "source", INSTALL_opts = "--byte-compile")
Not all contributed packages work correctly when byte-compiled (for example because they interfere with the sealing of namespaces). For most packages (especially those which make extensive use of compiled code) the speed-up is small. Unless a package is used frequently the time spent in byte-compilation can outweigh the time saved in execution: also byte-compilation can add substantially to the installed size of the package.
Byte-compilation can be controlled on a per-package basis by the 'ByteCompile' field in the DESCRIPTION file.
The command update.packages()
is the simplest way to ensure that all
the packages on your system are up to date. It downloads the list of
available packages and their current versions, compares it with those
installed and offers to fetch and install any that have later versions on
the repositories.
An alternative interface to keeping packages up-to-date is provided by the
command packageStatus()
, which returns an object with information on
all installed packages and packages available at multiple repositories. The
and summary
methods give an overview of installed and
available packages, the upgrade
method offers to fetch and install
the latest versions of outdated packages.
One sometimes-useful additional piece of information that
returns is the status of a package, as "ok"
or "unavailable"
(in the currently selected
repositories). For example
> inst <- packageStatus()$inst > inst[inst$Status != "ok", c("Package", "Version", "Status")] Package Version Status Biobase Biobase 2.8.0 unavailable RCurl RCurl 1.4-2 upgrade Rgraphviz Rgraphviz 1.26.0 unavailable rgdal rgdal 0.6-27 upgrade
Packages can be removed in a number of ways. From a command prompt they can be removed by
R CMD REMOVE -l /path/to/library pkg1 pkg2 …
From a running R process they can be removed by
> remove.packages(c("pkg1", "pkg2"), lib = file.path("path", "to", "library"))
Finally, in most installations one can just remove the package directory from the library.
Utilities such as install.packages
can be pointed at any
CRAN-style repository, and R users may want to set up their
own. The 'base' of a repository is a URL such as
http://www.omegahat.org/R/: this must be an URL scheme that
supports (which also includes 'ftp://' and
'file://' and on most systems 'https://'). Under that base URL
there should be directory trees for one or more of the following types of
package distributions:
: located at src/contrib and containing .tar.gz
files. Other forms of compression can be used, e.g. .tar.bz2 or
.tar.xz files. Complete repositories contain the sources
corresponding to any binary packages, and in any case it is wise to have a
src/contrib area with a possibly empty PACKAGES file.
: located at bin/windows/contrib/x.y for
R versions x.y.z and containing .zip files for Windows.
: located at
bin/macosx/mavericks/contrib/3.y for the CRAN build for
'Mavericks' (and later) for R versions 3.y.z, containing
.tgz files.
Each terminal directory must also contain a PACKAGES file. This can
be a concatenation of the DESCRIPTION files of the packages separated
by blank lines, but only a few of the fields are needed. The simplest way
to set up such a file is to use function write_PACKAGES
in the
tools package, and its help explains which fields are needed.
Optionally there can also be a PACKAGES.gz file, a
-compressed version of PACKAGES—as this will be
downloaded in preference to PACKAGES it should be included for large
repositories. (If you have a mis-configured server that does not report
correctly non-existent files you may need PACKAGES.gz.)
To add your repository to the list offered by setRepositories()
, see
the help file for that function.
Incomplete repositories are better specified via a contriburl
argument than via being set as a repository.
A repository can contain subdirectories, when the descriptions in the PACKAGES file of packages in subdirectories must include a line of the form
Path: path/to/subdirectory
—once again write_PACKAGES
is the simplest way to set this up.
It can be convenient to run R CMD check
on an installed package,
particularly on a platform which uses sub-architectures. The outline of how
to do this is, with the source package in directory pkg (or a
tarball filename):
R CMD INSTALL -l libdir pkg > pkg.log 2>&1 R CMD check -l libdir --install=check:pkg.log pkg
Where sub-architectures are in use the R CMD check
line can be
repeated with additional architectures by
R --arch arch CMD check -l libdir --extra-arch --install=check:pkg.log pkg
where --extra-arch selects only those checks which depend on the
installed code and not those which analyse the sources. (If multiple
sub-architectures fail only because they need different settings, e.g.
environment variables, --no-multiarch may need to be added to the
lines.) On Unix-alikes the architecture to run is selected
by --arch: this can also be used on Windows with
R_HOME/bin/R.exe, but it is more usual to select the path to
the Rcmd.exe
of the desired architecture.
So on Windows to install, check and package for distribution a source package from a tarball which has been tested on another platform one might use
.../bin/i386/Rcmd INSTALL -l libdir tarball --build > pkg.log 2>&1 .../bin/i386/Rcmd check -l libdir --extra-arch --install=check:pkg.log pkg .../bin/x64/Rcmd check -l libdir --extra-arch --install=check:pkg.log pkg
where one might want to run the second and third lines in a different shell with different settings for environment variables and the path (to find external software, notably for Gtk+).
can do a i386
install and then add the
DLL from a single command by
R CMD INSTALL --merge-multiarch -l libdir tarball
and --build can be added to zip up the installation.
Internationalization refers to the process of enabling support for many human languages, and localization to adapting to a specific country and language.
Current builds of R support all the character sets that the underlying OS
can handle. These are interpreted according to the
current locale
, a sufficiently complicated topic to merit a separate
section. Note though that R has no built-in support for right-to-left
languages and bidirectional output, relying on the OS services. For
example, how character vectors in UTF-8 containing both English digits and
Hebrew characters are printed is OS-dependent (and perhaps
The other aspect of the internationalization is support for the translation of messages. This is enabled in almost all builds of R.
A locale is a description of the local environment of the user,
including the preferred language, the encoding of characters, the currency
used and its conventions, and so on. Aspects of the locale are accessed by
the R functions Sys.getlocale
and Sys.localeconv
The system of naming locales is OS-specific. There is quite wide agreement on schemes, but not on the details of their implementation. A locale needs to specify
, @cyrillic
for Serbian, @iqtelif
) or
language dialect (e.g. @saaho
, a dialect of Afar, and
and @nynorsk
, dialects of Norwegian regarded by some
OSes as separate languages, no
and nn
R is principally concerned with the first (for translations) and third. Note that the charset may be deducible from the language, as some OSes offer only one charset per language.
Modern Linux uses the XPG21 locale specifications which have the form 'en_GB',
'en_GB.UTF-8', 'aa_ER.UTF-8@saaho', 'de_AT.iso885915@euro',
the components being in the order listed above. (See man locale
and locale -a
for more details.) Similar schemes are used by most
Unix-alikes: some (including some distributions of Linux) use '.utf8'
rather than '.UTF-8'.
Note that whereas UTF-8 locales are nowadays almost universally used, locales such as 'en_GB' use 8-bit encodings for backwards compatibility.
Windows also uses locales, but specified in a rather less concise way. Most users will encounter locales only via drop-down menus, but more information and lists can be found at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hzz3tw78(v=vs.80) (or if Microsoft moves it yet again, search for 'Windows language country strings').
It offers only one encoding per language.
Some care is needed with Windows' locale names. For example, chinese
is Traditional Chinese and not Simplified Chinese as used in most of the
Chinese-speaking world.
OS X supports locales in its own particular way, but the R GUI tries to make
this easier for users. See
for how users can set their locales. As with Windows, end users will
generally only see lists of languages/territories. Users of R in a
terminal may need to set the locale to something like 'en_GB.UTF-8' if
it defaults to 'C' (as it sometimes does when logging in remotely and
for batch jobs: note whether Terminal
sets the LANG
environment variable is an (advanced) preference, but does so by default).
Internally OS X uses a form similar to Linux: the main difference from other
Unix-alikes is that where a character set is not specified it is assumed to
be UTF-8
The preferred language for messages is by default taken from the locale.
This can be overridden first by the setting of the environment variable
and then22 by the environment
variables LC_ALL
and LANG
. (The last three
are normally used to set the locale and so should not be needed, but the
first is only used to select the language for messages.) The code tries
hard to map locales to languages, but on some systems (notably Windows) the
locale names needed for the environment variable LC_ALL
do not all
correspond to XPG language names and so LANGUAGE
may need to be set.
(One example is 'LC_ALL=es' on Windows which sets the locale to
Estonian and the language to Spanish.)
It is usually possible to change the language once R is running
via (not Windows) Sys.setlocale("LC_MESSAGES", "new_locale")
or by setting an environment variable such as LANGUAGE
the language you are changing to can be output in the current character
set. But this is OS-specific, and has been known to stop working on an OS
Messages are divided into domains, and translations may be available for some or all messages in a domain. R makes use of the following domains.
for the C-level error and warning messages from the R
for the R stop
, warning
messages in each package, including R-base
for the
base package.
for the C-level messages in each package.
for the menus etc of the R for Windows GUI front-end.
Dividing up the messages in this way allows R to be extensible: as packages are loaded, their message translation catalogues can be loaded too.
R can be built without support for translations, but it is enabled by default.
R-level and C-level domains are subtly different, for example in the way strings are canonicalized before being passed for translation.
Translations are looked for by domain according to the currently specified language, as specifically as possible, so for example an Austrian ('de_AT') translation catalogue will be used in preference to a generic German one ('de') for an Austrian user. However, if a specific translation catalogue exists but does not contain a translation, the less specific catalogues are consulted. For example, R has catalogues for 'en_GB' that translate the Americanisms (e.g., 'gray') in the standard messages into English.24 Two other examples: there are catalogues for 'es', which is Spanish as written in Spain and these will by default also be used in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, and also for 'pt_BR', which are used for Brazilian locales but not for locales specifying Portugal.
Translations in the right language but the wrong charset are made use of
by on-the-fly re-encoding. The LANGUAGE
variable (only) can be a
colon-separated list, for example 'se:de', giving a set of languages in
decreasing order of preference. One special value is 'en@quot', which
can be used in a UTF-8 locale to have American error messages with pairs of
single quotes translated to Unicode directional quotes.
If no suitable translation catalogue is found or a particular message is not translated in any suitable catalogue, 'English'25 is used.
See https://developer.r-project.org/Translations30.html for how to prepare and install translation catalogues.
Almost all current CPUs have both 32- and 64-bit sets of instructions. Most OSes running on such CPUs offer the choice of building a 32-bit or a 64-bit version of R (and details are given below under specific OSes). For most a 32-bit version is the default, but for some (e.g., 'x86_64' Linux and OS X >= 10.6) 64-bit is.
All current versions of R use 32-bit integers and ISO/IEC 6055926 double-precision reals, and so compute to the same precision27 and with the same limits on the sizes of numerical quantities. The principal difference is in the size of the pointers.
64-bit builds have both advantages and disadvantages:
R allocates memory for large objects as needed, and removes any unused ones at garbage collection. When the sizes of objects become an appreciable fraction of the address limit, fragmentation of the address space becomes an issue and there may be no hole available that is the size requested. This can cause more frequent garbage collection or the inability to allocate large objects. As a guide, this will become an issue for 32-bit builds with objects more than 10% of the size of the address space (around 300Mb) or when the total size of objects in use is around one third (around 1Gb).
selects suitable defines if this is possible. (We have
also largely worked around that limit on 32-bit Windows.) 64-bit builds
have much larger limits.
So, for speed you may want to use a 32-bit build (especially on a laptop), but to handle large datasets (and perhaps large files) a 64-bit build. You can often build both and install them in the same place: See Sub-architectures. (This is done for the Windows binary distributions.)
Even on 64-bit builds of R there are limits on the size of R objects
(see help("Memory-limits")
, some of which stem from the use of 32-bit
integers (especially in FORTRAN code). For example, the dimensions of an
array are limited to 2^{31} - 1.
The routines supporting the distribution and special28 functions in R and a few others are declared in C header file Rmath.h. These can be compiled into a standalone library for linking to other applications. (Note that they are not a separate library when R is built, and the standalone version differs in several ways.)
The makefiles and other sources needed are in directory src/nmath/standalone, so the following instructions assume that is the current working directory (in the build directory tree on a Unix-alike if that is separate from the sources).
Rmath.h contains 'R_VERSION_STRING', which is a character string
containing the current R version, for example "3.3.0"
There is full access to R's handling of NaN
, Inf
via special versions of the macros and functions
ISNAN, R_FINITE, R_log, R_pow and R_pow_di
and (extern) constants R_PosInf
, R_NegInf
and NA_REAL
There is no support for R's notion of missing values, in particular not
for NA_INTEGER
nor the distinction between NA
and NaN
for doubles.
A little care is needed to use the random-number routines. You will need to supply the uniform random number generator
double unif_rand(void)
or use the one supplied (and with a shared library or DLL you may have to use the one supplied, which is the Marsaglia-multicarry with an entry point
set_seed(unsigned int, unsigned int)
to set its seeds).
The facilities to change the normal random number generator are available through the constant N01_kind. This takes values from the enumeration type
typedef enum { BUGGY_KINDERMAN_RAMAGE, AHRENS_DIETER, BOX_MULLER, USER_NORM, INVERSION, KINDERMAN_RAMAGE } N01type;
(and 'USER_NORM' is not available).
If R has not already been made in the directory tree, configure
must be run as described in the main build instructions.
Then (in src/nmath/standalone)
will make standalone libraries libRmath.a and libRmath.so (libRmath.dylib on OS X): 'make static' and 'make shared' will create just one of them.
To use the routines in your own C or C++ programs, include
#define MATHLIB_STANDALONE #include <Rmath.h>
and link against '-lRmath' (and '-lm' if needed on your OS). The
example file test.c does nothing useful, but is provided to test the
process (via make test
). Note that you will probably not be able
to run it unless you add the directory containing
libRmath.so to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
environment variable
(libRmath.dylib, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
on OS X).
The targets
make install make uninstall
will (un)install the header Rmath.h and shared and static
libraries (if built). Both prefix=
and DESTDIR
are supported,
together with more precise control as described for the main build.
'make install' installs a file for pkg-config
to use by e.g.
$(CC) `pkg-config --cflags libRmath` -c test.c $(CC) `pkg-config --libs libRmath` test.o -o test
On some systems 'make install-strip' will install a stripped shared library.
You need to set up29 almost all the tools to make R and then run (in a Unix-like shell)
(cd ../../gnuwin32; make MkRules) (cd ../../include; make -f Makefile.win config.h Rconfig.h Rmath.h) make -f Makefile.win
Alternatively, in a cmd.exe shell use
cd ../../include make -f Makefile.win config.h Rconfig.h Rmath.h cd ../nmath/standalone make -f Makefile.win
This creates a static library libRmath.a and a DLL Rmath.dll. If you want an import library libRmath.dll.a (you don't need one), use
make -f Makefile.win shared implib
To use the routines in your own C or C++ programs using MinGW, include
#define MATHLIB_STANDALONE #include <Rmath.h>
and link against '-lRmath'. This will use the first found of libRmath.dll.a, libRmath.a and Rmath.dll in that order, so the result depends on which files are present. You should be able to force static or dynamic linking via
-Wl,-Bstatic -lRmath -Wl,dynamic -Wl,-Bdynamic -lRmath
or by linking to explicit files (as in the 'test' target in Makefile.win: this makes two executables, test.exe which is dynamically linked, and test-static.exe, which is statically linked).
It is possible to link to Rmath.dll using other compilers, either directly or via an import library: if you make a MinGW import library as above, you will create a file Rmath.def which can be used (possibly after editing) to create an import library for other systems such as Visual C++.
If you make use of dynamic linking you should use
#define MATHLIB_STANDALONE #define RMATH_DLL #include <Rmath.h>
to ensure that the constants like NA_REAL
are linked correctly.
(Auto-import will probably work with MinGW, but it is better to be
sure. This is likely to also work with VC++, Borland and similar compilers.)
This appendix gives details of programs you will need to build R on
Unix-like platforms, or which will be used by R if found by
Remember that some package management systems (such as RPM and Debian/Ubuntu's) make a distinction between the user version of a package and the development version. The latter usually has the same name but with the extension '-devel' or '-dev': you need both versions installed.
You need a means of compiling C and FORTRAN 90 (see Using FORTRAN).
Your C compiler should be
ISO/IEC 6005930, POSIX 1003.1 and C99-compliant.31 R tries to choose suitable flags for the C
compilers it knows about, but you may have to set CC
or CFLAGS
suitably. For many versions of gcc
with glibc
this means
including -std=gnu9932. If the compiler is detected as
, -std=gnu99 will be appended to
unless it conflicts with a setting of CFLAGS
. (Note that
options essential to run the compiler even for linking, such as those to set
the architecture, should be specified as part of CC
rather than in
Unless you do not want to view graphs on-screen (or use a Mac) you need 'X11' installed, including its headers and client libraries. For recent Fedora distributions it means (at least) RPMs 'libX11', 'libX11-devel', 'libXt' and 'libXt-devel'. On Debian we recommend the meta-package 'xorg-dev'. If you really do not want these you will need to explicitly configure R without X11, using --with-x=no.
The command-line editing (and command completion) depends on the
GNU readline
library: version 4.2 or later is needed for
all the features to be enabled. Otherwise you will need to configure with
--with-readline=no (or equivalent).
A suitably comprehensive iconv
function is essential. The R usage
requires iconv
to be able to translate between "latin1"
, to recognize ""
(as the current encoding) and
, and to translate to and from the Unicode wide-character
formats "UCS-[24][BL]E"
— this is true by default for
33 but
not of most commercial Unixes. However, you can make use of GNU
(as used on OS X: see
The OS needs to have enough support34 for wide-character types: this is checked at configuration. A small number of POSIX functions35 are essential, and others36 will be used if available.
Installations of zlib
(version 1.2.5 or later), libbz2
(version 1.0.6 or later: called bzip2-libs/bzip2-devel or
libbz2-1.0/libbz2-dev by some Linux distributions),
37 version 5.0.3 or later, PCRE (version 8.10 or
later, preferably 8.32 or later38) and libcurl
(version 7.28.0 or later) are required.
Information on libcurl
is found from the curl-config
script: if that is missing or needs to be overridden39 there are macros to do so described in file config.site.
A tar
program is needed to unpack the sources and packages
(including the recommended packages). A version40 that can
automagically detect compressed archives is preferred for use with
: the configure script looks for gtar
– use environment variable TAR
to override this.
There need to be suitable versions of the tools grep
: the problems are usually with old AT&T and BSD variants.
will try to find suitable versions (including looking in
/usr/xpg4/bin which is used on some commercial Unixes).
You will not be able to build most of the manuals unless you have
version 5.1 or later installed, and if not most of the
HTML manuals will be linked to a version on CRAN. To make PDF
versions of the manuals you will also need file texinfo.tex installed
(which is part of the GNU texinfo distribution but is often
made part of the TeX package in re-distributions) as well as
.41 Further, the versions
of texi2dvi
and texinfo.tex need to be compatible: we have
seen problems with older TeX distributions.
If you want to build from the R Subversion repository then
is highly recommended as it is used to create files in
the tarball but not under Subversion.
The PDF documentation (including doc/NEWS.pdf) and building vignettes
needs pdftex
and pdflatex
. We require LaTeX version
or later (for UTF-8 support). Building PDF package
manuals (including the R reference manual) and vignettes is sensitive to
the version of the LaTeX package hyperref and we recommend that the
TeX distribution used is kept up-to-date. A number of standard LaTeX
packages are required (including fancyvrb, url and some of the
font packages such as times, helvetic, ec and
cm-super) and others such as hyperref and inconsolata are
desirable (and without them you may need to change R's defaults:
see Making the manuals). Note that package hyperref (currently)
requires packages kvoptions, ltxcmds and refcount. For
distributions based on TeXLive the simplest approach may be to install
collections collection-latex, collection-fontsrecommended,
collection-latexrecommended, collection-fontsextra and
collection-latexextra (assuming they are not installed by default):
Fedora uses names like texlive-collection-fontsextra and Debian/Ubuntu
like texlive-fonts-extra.
The essential programs should be in your PATH
at the time
is run: this will capture the full paths.
The ability to use translated messages makes use of gettext
and most
likely needs GNU gettext
: you do need this to work with new
translations, but otherwise the version contained in the R sources will be
used if no suitable external gettext
is found.
The 'modern' version of the X11()
, jpeg()
, png()
graphics devices uses the cairo
and (optionally)
libraries. Cairo version 1.2.0 or later is required. Pango
needs to be at least version 1.10, and 1.12 is the earliest version we have
tested. (For Fedora users we believe the pango-devel
RPM and its
dependencies suffice.) R checks for pkg-config
, and uses that
to check first that the 'pangocairo' package is installed (and if not,
'cairo') and if additional flags are needed for the 'cairo-xlib'
package, then if suitable code can be compiled. These tests will fail if
is not installed42, and are likely to fail if cairo
was built statically
(unusual). Most systems with Gtk+
2.8 or later installed will have
suitable libraries
For the best font experience with these devices you need suitable fonts
installed: Linux users will want the urw-fonts
package. On platforms
which have it available, the msttcorefonts
package43 provides
TrueType versions of Monotype fonts such as Arial and Times New Roman.
Another useful set of fonts is the 'liberation' TrueType fonts available at
https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/,44 which cover the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets plus
a fair range of signs. These share metrics with Arial, Times New Roman and
Courier New, and contain fonts rather similar to the first two
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_fonts). Then there is
the 'Free UCS Outline Fonts' project
(https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/) which are OpenType/TrueType
fonts based on the URW fonts but with extended Unicode coverage. See the
R help on X11
on selecting such fonts.
The bitmapped graphics devices jpeg()
, png()
and tiff()
need the appropriate headers and libraries installed: jpeg
6b or later, or libjpeg-turbo
) or libpng
(version 1.2.7 or
later) and zlib
or libtiff
(any recent version – 3.9.[4567]
and 4.0.[23] have been tested) respectively. They also need support for
either X11
or cairo
(see above). Should support for these
devices not be required or broken system libraries need to be
avoided there are configure
options --without-libpng,
--without-jpeglib and --without-libtiff. For most system
installations the TIFF libraries will require JPEG libraries to be present
and perhaps linked explicitly, so --without-jpeglib may also
disable the tiff()
device. The tiff()
devices only require a
basic build of libtiff
(not even JPEG support is needed). Recent
versions allow several other libraries to be linked into libtiff
as lzma
, jbig
and jpeg12
, and these may need also to be
Option --with-system-tre is also available: it needs a recent
version of TRE. (The current sources are in the git
repository at
https://github.com/laurikari/tre/, but at the time of writing the
resulting build will not pass its checks.).
Library liblzma
from xz-utils
version 5.0.3 or later
(including 5.2.x) will be used if installed: the version in the R sources
can be selected instead by configuring with --without-system-xz.
Systems differ in what they call the package including this: e.g. on
Fedora the library is in 'xz-libs' and the headers in 'xz-devel'.
An implementation of XDR is required, and the R sources contain
one which is likely to suffice (although a system version may have higher
performance). XDR is part of RPC and historically has
been part of libc on a Unix-alike. However some builds of
hide it with the intention that the TI-RPC library be
used instead, in which case libtirpc
(and its development version)
needs to be installed, and its headers need to be on the C include path or
in /usr/include/tirpc.
Use of the X11 clipboard selection requires the Xmu
headers and
libraries. These are normally part of an X11 installation (e.g. the
Debian meta-package 'xorg-dev'), but some distributions have split this
into smaller parts, so for example recent versions of Fedora require the
'libXmu' and 'libXmu-devel' RPMs.
Some systems (notably OS X and at least some FreeBSD systems) have
inadequate support for collation in multibyte locales. It is possible to
replace the OS's collation support by that from ICU (International
Components for Unicode, http://site.icu-project.org/), and this
provides much more precise control over collation on all systems. ICU is
available as sources and as binary distributions for (at least) most Linux
distributions, Solaris, FreeBSD and AIX, usually as libicu
. It will be used by default where available: should a very old
or broken version of ICU be found this can be suppressed by
The bitmap
and dev2bitmap
devices and function
use ghostscript (http://www.ghostscript.com/).
This should either be in your path when the command is run, or its full path
specified by the environment variable R_GSCMD
at that time.
The tcltk package needs Tcl/Tk >= 8.4 installed: the sources are available at https://www.tcl.tk/. To specify the locations of the Tcl/Tk files you may need the configuration options
use Tcl/Tk, or specify its library directory
specify location of tclConfig.sh
specify location of tkConfig.sh
or use the configure variables TCLTK_LIBS
and TCLTK_CPPFLAGS
to specify the flags needed for linking against the Tcl and Tk libraries and
for finding the tcl.h and tk.h headers, respectively. If you
have both 32- and 64-bit versions of Tcl/Tk installed, specifying the paths
to the correct config files may be necessary to avoid confusion between
Versions of Tcl/Tk up to 8.5.18 and 8.6.4 have been tested (including most versions of 8.4.x, but not recently).
Note that the tk.h header includes45 X11 headers, so you will need X11 and its development files installed.
The build process looks for Java support on the host system, and if it finds
it sets some settings which are useful for Java-using packages (such as
rJava and JavaGD). This check can be suppressed by
configure option --disable-java.
Configure variable JAVA_HOME
can be set to point to a specific
JRE/JDK, on the configure
command line or in the environment.
Principal amongst these settings are some library paths to the Java
libraries and JVM, which are stored in environment variable
in file R_HOME/etc/ldpaths (or a
sub-architecture-specific version). A typical setting for 'x86_64'
Linux is
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-126.96.36.199-4.b16.fc21.x86_64/jre R_JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64/server
Note that this unfortunately depends on the exact version of the JRE/JDK
installed, and so may need updating if the Java installation is updated.
This can be done by running R CMD javareconf
which updates settings
in both etc/Makeconf and R_HOME/etc/ldpaths. See R
CMD javareconf --help
for details.
Another way of overriding those settings is to set the environment variable
(before R is started, hence not in
~/.Renviron), which suffices to run already-installed Java-using
packages. For example
It may be possible to avoid this by specifying an invariant link as the path. For example, on that system any of
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0 JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0/jre
Some add-on packages need a C++ compiler. This is specified by the
configure variables CXX
and similar.
will normally find a suitable compiler. However, in
most cases this will be a C++98 compiler, and as from R 3.1.0 it is
possible to specify an alternative compiler for use with C++11 by the
configure variables CXX1X
similar. Again, configure
will normally find a suitable value for
if the compiler given by CXX
is capable of compiling
C++11 code, but it is possible that a completely different compiler will be
Other packages need full Fortran 90 (or later) support. For source files
with extension .f90 or .f95, the compiler defined by the macro
is used by R CMD INSTALL
. This is found when R is
configured and is often the same as F77
: note that it is detected by
the name of the command without a test that it can actually compile Fortran
90 code. Set the configure variable FC
to override this if
necessary: variables FCFLAGS
and SHLIB_FCLDFLAGS
might also need to be set.
See file config.site in the R source for more details about these variables.
The linear algebra routines in R can make use of enhanced BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms, http://www.netlib.org/blas/faq.html) routines. However, these have to be explicitly requested at configure time: R provides an internal BLAS which is well-tested and will be adequate for most uses of R.
You can specify a particular BLAS library via a value for
the configuration option --with-blas and not to use an external
BLAS library by --without-blas (the default). If
--with-blas is given with no =
, its value is taken from the
environment variable BLAS_LIBS
, set for example in
config.site. If neither the option nor the environment variable
supply a value, a search is made for a suitable BLAS. If the
value is not obviously a linker command (starting with a dash or giving the
path to a library), it is prefixed by '-l', so
is an instruction to link against '-lfoo' to find an external BLAS (which needs to be found both at link time and run time).
The configure code checks that the external BLAS is complete (it
must include all double precision and double complex routines, as well as
), and appears to be usable. However, an external
BLAS has to be usable from a shared object (so must contain
position-independent code), and that is not checked.
Some enhanced BLASes are compiler-system-specific (sunperf
on Solaris46, libessl
on IBM, Accelerate
on OS
X). The correct incantation for these is usually found via
--with-blas with no value on the appropriate platforms.
Some of the external BLASes are multi-threaded. One issue is that
R profiling (which uses the SIGPROF
signal) may cause problems,
and you may want to disable profiling if you use a multi-threaded
BLAS. Note that using a multi-threaded BLAS can result
in taking more CPU time and even more elapsed time (occasionally
dramatically so) than using a similar single-threaded BLAS. On a
machine running other tasks, there can be contention for CPU caches that
reduces the effectiveness of the optimization of cache use by a
BLAS implementation.
Note that under Unix (but not under Windows) if R is compiled against a non-default BLAS and --enable-BLAS-shlib is not used, then all BLAS-using packages must also be. So if R is re-built to use an enhanced BLAS then packages such as quantreg will need to be re-installed.
R relies on ISO/IEC 60559 compliance of an
external BLAS. This can be broken if for example the code assumes
that terms with a zero factor are always zero and do not need to be
computed—whereas x*0
can be NaN
. This is checked in the
test suite.
External BLAS implementations often make less use of extended-precision floating-point registers and will almost certainly re-order computations. This can result in less accuracy than using the internal BLAS, and may result in different solutions, e.g. different signs in SVD and eigendecompositions.
The URIs for several of these BLAS are subject to frequent gratuitous changes, so you will need to search for their current locations.
ATLAS (http://math-atlas.sourceforge.net/) is a "tuned" BLAS that runs on a wide range of Unix-alike platforms. Unfortunately it is built by default as a static library that on some platforms cannot be used with shared objects such as are used in R packages. Be careful when using pre-built versions of ATLAS (they seem to work on 'ix86' platforms, but not always on 'x86_64' ones).
The usual way to specify ATLAS will be via
--with-blas="-lf77blas -latlas"
if the libraries are in the library path, otherwise by
--with-blas="-L/path/to/ATLAS/libs -lf77blas -latlas"
For example, 'x86_64' Fedora needs
--with-blas="-L/usr/lib64/atlas -lf77blas -latlas"
For systems with multiple CPU cores it is possible to use a multi-threaded version of ATLAS, by specifying
--with-blas="-lptf77blas -lpthread -latlas"
Consult its installation guide for how to build ATLAS with position-independent code, and as a shared library.
For 'x86_64' processors47 under Linux there is the AMD Core Math Library (ACML). For the
version we could use
if the appropriate library directory (such as
/opt/acml5.1.0/gfortran64/lib) is in the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
. For
other compilers, see the ACML documentation. There is a multithreaded Linux
version of ACML available for recent versions of gfortran
. To
make use of this you will need something like
--with-blas="-L/opt/acml5.1.0/gfortran64_mp/lib -lacml_mp"
(and you may need to arrange for the directory to be in ld.so
See see Shared BLAS for an alternative (and in many ways preferable) way to use ACML.
The version last tested (5.1.0) failed the reg-BLAS.R test in its
handling of NA
Dr Kazushige Goto wrote a tuned BLAS for several processors and OSes, which was frozen in mid-2010. The final version is known as GotoBLAS2, and was re-released under a much less restrictive licence. Once it is built and installed, it can be used by configuring R with
See see Shared BLAS for an alternative (and in many ways preferable) way to use it.
OpenBLAS (http://www.openblas.net/) is a descendant project with support for some later CPUs (e.g. Intel Sandy Bridge). Once installed it can be used by something like
or as a shared BLAS.
For Intel processors (and perhaps others) and some distributions of Linux, there is Intel's Math Kernel Library. You are strongly encouraged to read the MKL User's Guide, which is installed with the library, before attempting to link to MKL. This includes a 'link line advisor' which will suggest appropriate incantations: its use is recommended. Or see https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-mkl-link-line-advisor.
There are also versions of MKL for OS X and Windows, but at the time these were tried they did not work with the standard compilers used for R on those platforms.
The MKL interface has changed several times and may change again: the following examples have been used with versions 10.3 to 11.3, for GCC compilers on 'x86_64'.
To a sequential version of MKL we used
MKL_LIB_PATH=/path/to/intel_mkl/lib/intel64 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$MKL_LIB_PATH MKL="-L${MKL_LIB_PATH} -lmkl_gf_lp64 -lmkl_core -lmkl_sequential" ./configure --with-blas="$MKL" --with-lapack
The option --with-lapack is used since MKL contains a tuned copy of LAPACK as well as BLAS (see LAPACK), although this can be omitted.
Threaded MKL may be used by replacing the line defining the variable
MKL="-L${MKL_LIB_PATH} -lmkl_gf_lp64 -lmkl_core \ -lmkl_gnu_thread -dl -lpthread"
The default number of threads will be chosen by the OpenMP software, but can
be controlled by setting OMP_NUM_THREADS
or MKL_NUM_THREADS
and in recent versions seems to default to a sensible value for sole use of
the machine.
It has been reported that
--with-blas='-mkl=parallel' --with-lapack
worked with the Intel 2015.3 compilers on Centos 6.
The BLAS library will be used for many of the add-on packages as well as for R itself. This means that it is better to use a shared/dynamic BLAS library, as most of a static library will be compiled into the R executable and each BLAS-using package.
R offers the option of compiling the BLAS into a dynamic
library libRblas
stored in R_HOME/lib and linking both
R itself and all the add-on packages against that library.
This is the default on all platforms except AIX unless an external BLAS is specified and found: for the latter it can be used by specifying the option --enable-BLAS-shlib, and it can always be disabled via --disable-BLAS-shlib.
This has both advantages and disadvantages.
, and that can be replaced. Note though that any
dynamic libraries the replacement links to will need to be found by the
linker: this may need the library path to be changed in
Another option to change the BLAS in use is to symlink a dynamic BLAS library (such as ACML or Goto's) to R_HOME/lib/libRblas.so. For example, just
mv R_HOME/lib/libRblas.so R_HOME/lib/libRblas.so.keep ln -s /opt/acml5.1.0/gfortran64_mp/lib/libacml_mp.so R_HOME/lib/libRblas.so
will change the BLAS in use to multithreaded ACML. A similar link
works for some versions of Goto BLAS, OpenBLAS and MKL (provided
the appropriate lib directory is in the run-time library path or
Provision is made for using an external LAPACK library, principally to cope
with BLAS libraries which contain a copy of LAPACK (such as
on Solaris, Accelerate
on OS X and ACML and MKL on
'ix86'/'x86_64' Linux). At least LAPACK version 3.2 is
required. This can only be done if --with-blas has been used.
However, the likely performance gains are thought to be small (and may be negative), and the default is not to search for a suitable LAPACK library, and this is definitely not recommended. You can specify a specific LAPACK library or a search for a generic library by the configuration option --with-lapack. The default for --with-lapack is to check the BLAS library and then look for an external library '-llapack'. Sites searching for the fastest possible linear algebra may want to build a LAPACK library using the ATLAS-optimized subset of LAPACK. To do so specify something like
--with-lapack="-L/path/to/ATLAS/libs -llapack -lcblas"
since the ATLAS subset of LAPACK depends on libcblas
. A value for
--with-lapack can be set via the environment variable
, but this will only be used if --with-lapack is
specified (as the default value is no
) and the BLAS library
does not contain LAPACK.
Since ACML contains a full LAPACK, if selected as the BLAS it can be used as the LAPACK via --with-lapack.
If you do use --with-lapack, be aware of potential problems with
bugs in the LAPACK sources (or in the posted corrections to those sources).
In particular, bugs in DGEEV
and DGESDD
have resulted in error
messages such as
DGEBRD gave error code -10
. Other potential problems are incomplete versions of the libraries, seen several times in Linux distributions over the years.
Please do bear in mind that using --with-lapack is 'definitely not recommended': it is provided only because it is necessary on some platforms and because some users want to experiment with claimed performance improvements. Reporting problems where it is used unnecessarily will simply irritate the R helpers.
Note too the comments about ISO/IEC 60559 compliance in the section of external BLAS: these apply equally to an external LAPACK, and for example the Intel MKL documentation says
LAPACK routines assume that input matrices do not contain IEEE 754 special values such as INF or NaN values. Using these special values may cause LAPACK to return unexpected results or become unstable.
We rely on limited support in LAPACK for matrices with 2^{31} or more elements: it is quite possible that an external LAPACK will not have that support.
If you have a pure FORTRAN 77 compiler which cannot compile LAPACK it may be possible to use CLAPACK from http://www.netlib.org/clapack/ by something like
-with-lapack="-lclapack -lf2c"
provided these were built with position-independent code and the calling conventions for double complex function return values match those in the BLAS used, so it may be simpler to use CLAPACK built to use CBLAS and
-with-lapack="-lclapack -lcblas -lf2c"
As with all libraries, you need to ensure that they and R were compiled
with compatible compilers and flags. For example, this has meant that on
Sun Sparc using the native compilers the flag -dalign is needed if
is to be used.
On some systems it has been necessary that an external BLAS/LAPACK was built with the same FORTRAN compiler used to build R.
has many options: running
./configure --help
will give a list. Probably the most important ones not covered elsewhere are (defaults in brackets)
use the X Window System [yes]
X include files are in DIR
X library files are in DIR
use readline library (if available) [yes]
attempt to compile support for Rprof()
attempt to compile support for Rprofmem()
and tracemem()
build R as a shared/dynamic library [no]
build the BLAS as a shared/dynamic library [yes, except on AIX]
You can use --without-foo or --disable-foo for the negatives.
You will want to use --disable-R-profiling if you are building a profiled executable of R (e.g. with '-pg)'.
Flag --enable-R-shlib causes the make process to build R as a dynamic (shared) library, typically called libR.so, and link the main R executable R.bin against that library. This can only be done if all the code (including system libraries) can be compiled into a dynamic library, and there may be a performance48 penalty. So you probably only want this if you will be using an application which embeds R. Note that C code in packages installed on an R system linked with --enable-R-shlib is linked against the dynamic library and so such packages cannot be used from an R system built in the default way. Also, because packages are linked against R they are on some OSes also linked against the dynamic libraries R itself is linked against, and this can lead to symbol conflicts.
For maximally effective use of valgrind
, R should be compiled
with valgrind instrumentation. The configure
option is
--with-valgrind-instrumentation=level, where level is
0, 1 or 2. (Level 0 is the default and does not add anything.) The system
headers for valgrind
can be requested by option
--with-system-valgrind-headers: they will be used if present (on
Linux they may be in a separate package such as valgrind-devel). Note
though that there is no guarantee that the code in R will be compatible
with very old49 or future valgrind
If you need to re-configure R with different options you may need to run
make clean
or even make distclean
before doing so.
The configure script has other generic options added by
and which are not supported for R: in particular
building for one architecture on a different host is not possible.
Translation of messages is supported via GNU gettext
disabled by the configure option --disable-nls. The
report will show NLS
as one of the 'Additional
capabilities' if support has been compiled in, and running in an English
locale (but not the C
locale) will include
Natural language support but running in an English locale
in the greeting on starting R.
If you need or want to set certain configure variables to something other than their default, you can do that by either editing the file config.site (which documents many of the variables you might want to set: others can be seen in file etc/Renviron.in) or on the command line as
./configure VAR=value
If you are building in a directory different from the sources, there can be copies of config.site in the source and the build directories, and both will be read (in that order). In addition, if there is a file ~/.R/config, it is read between the config.site files in the source and the build directories.
There is also a general autoconf
mechanism for config.site
files, which are read before any of those mentioned in the previous
paragraph. This looks first at a file specified by the
environment variable CONFIG_SITE
, and if not is set at files such as
/usr/local/share/config.site and /usr/local/etc/config.site in
the area (exemplified by /usr/local) where R would be installed.
These variables are precious, implying that they do not have to be exported to the environment, are kept in the cache even if not specified on the command line, checked for consistency between two configure runs (provided that caching is used), and are kept during automatic reconfiguration as if having been passed as command line arguments, even if no cache is used.
See the variable output section of configure --help
for a list of all
these variables.
If you find you need to alter configure variables, it is worth noting that some settings may be cached in the file config.cache, and it is a good idea to remove that file (if it exists) before re-configuring. Note that caching is turned off by default: use the command line option --config-cache (or -C) to enable caching.
One common variable to change is R_PAPERSIZE
, which defaults to
'a4', not 'letter'. (Valid values are 'a4', 'letter',
'legal' and 'executive'.)
This is used both when configuring R to set the default, and when running R to override the default. It is also used to set the paper size when making PDF manuals.
The configure default will most often be 'a4' if R_PAPERSIZE
unset. (If the (Debian Linux) program paperconf
is found
or the environment variable PAPERSIZE
is set, these are used to
produce the default.)
Another precious variable is R_BROWSER
, the default HTML browser,
which should take a value of an executable in the user's path or specify a
full path.
Its counterpart for PDF files is R_PDFVIEWER
If you have libraries and header files, e.g., for GNU readline, in
non-system directories, use the variables LDFLAGS
(for libraries,
using '-L' flags to be passed to the linker) and CPPFLAGS
header files, using '-I' flags to be passed to the C/C++
preprocessors), respectively, to specify these locations. These default to
'-L/usr/local/lib' (LDFLAGS
, '-L/usr/local/lib64' on most
64-bit Linux OSes) and '-I/usr/local/include' (CPPFLAGS
) to
catch the most common cases. If libraries are still not found, then maybe
your compiler/linker does not support re-ordering of -L and
-l flags (this has been reported to be a problem on HP-UX with the
native cc
). In this case, use a different compiler (or a front
end shell script which does the re-ordering).
These flags can also be used to build a faster-running version of R. On
most platforms using gcc
, having '-O3' in CFLAGS
produces worthwhile performance gains with gcc
, but may result in a less reliable build (both segfaults
and incorrect numeric computations have been seen). On systems using the
GNU linker (especially those using R as a shared library), it
is likely that including '-Wl,-O1' in LDFLAGS
is worthwhile, and
''-Bdirect,--hash-style=both,-Wl,-O1'' is recommended at
https://lwn.net/Articles/192624/. Tuning compilation to a
specific CPU family (e.g. '-mtune=native' for
) can give worthwhile performance gains, especially on older
architectures such as 'ix86'.
The default settings for making the manuals are controlled by R_RD4PDF
and R_PAPERSIZE
By default the shell scripts such as R will be '#!/bin/sh'
scripts (or using the SHELL
chosen by configure). This is
almost always satisfactory, but on a few systems /bin/sh is not a
Bourne shell or clone, and the shell to be used can be changed by setting
the configure variable R_SHELL
to a suitable value (a full path to a
shell, e.g. /usr/local/bin/bash).
To compile R, you will most likely find it easiest to use GNU
, although the Sun make
works on Solaris. The
native make
has been reported to fail on SGI Irix 6.5 and
Alpha/OSF1 (aka Tru64).
To build in a separate directory you need a make
that supports the
variable, for example GNU make
and Sun
has also been used. e.g, on Solaris 10.
If you want to use a make
by another name, for example if your
GNU make
is called 'gmake', you need to set the
variable MAKE
at configure time, for example
./configure MAKE=gmake
To compile R, you need a FORTRAN compiler. The default is to search for
, fort
, xlf95
, ifort
, efc
, pgf95
, ftn
, g95
, f90
, pghpf
, pgf90
, epcf90
, f77
, xlf
, frt
, pgf77
, fort77
, fl32
, af77
(in that
order)50, and use whichever is
found first; if none is found, R cannot be compiled. However, if
is gcc
, the matching FORTRAN compiler (g77
for gcc
3 and gfortran
for gcc
4) is
used if available.
The search mechanism can be changed using the configure variable F77
which specifies the command that runs the FORTRAN 77 compiler. If your
FORTRAN compiler is in a non-standard location, you
should set the environment variable PATH
accordingly before running
, or use the configure variable F77
to specify its
full path.
If your FORTRAN libraries are in slightly peculiar places, you should
also look at LD_LIBRARY_PATH
or your system's equivalent to make sure
that all libraries are on this path.
Note that only FORTRAN compilers which convert identifiers to lower case are supported.
You must set whatever compilation flags (if any) are needed to ensure that
FORTRAN integer
is equivalent to a C int
pointer and FORTRAN
double precision
is equivalent to a C double
pointer. This is
checked during the configuration process.
Some of the FORTRAN code makes use of COMPLEX*16
variables, which is
a Fortran 90 extension. This is checked for at configure time51, but you may need to avoid compiler flags asserting
FORTRAN 77 compliance.
Compiling the version of LAPACK in the R sources also requires some Fortran 90 extensions, but these are not needed if an external LAPACK is used.
It might be possible to use f2c
, the FORTRAN-to-C converter
(http://www.netlib.org/f2c), via a script. (An example script is
given in scripts/f77_f2c: this can be customized by setting
the environment variables F2C
.) You will need to ensure that the FORTRAN type integer
translated to the C type int
. Normally f2c.h contains
'typedef long int integer;', which will work on a 32-bit platform but
needs to be changed to 'typedef int integer;' on a 64-bit platform. If
your compiler is not gcc
you will need to set
appropriately. Also, the included LAPACK sources contain
constructs that f2c
is unlikely to be able to process, so you
would need to use an external LAPACK library (such as CLAPACK from
A wide range of flags can be set in the file config.site or as configure variables on the command line. We have already mentioned
header file search directory (-I) and any other miscellaneous options for the C and C++ preprocessors and compilers
path (-L), stripping (-s) and any other miscellaneous options for the linker
and others include
debugging and optimization flags, C
ditto, for compiling the main program
for shared objects
debugging and optimization flags, FORTRAN
ditto for source files which need exact floating point behaviour
ditto, for compiling the main program
for shared objects
additional flags for the main link
additional flags for linking the shared objects
the primary library directory, lib or lib64
special flags for compiling C code to be turned into a shared object
special flags for compiling Fortran code to be turned into a shared object
special flags for compiling C++ code to be turned into a shared object
special flags for compiling Fortran 95 code to be turned into a shared object
defines to be used when compiling C code in R itself
Library paths specified as -L/lib/path in LDFLAGS
collected together and prepended to LD_LIBRARY_PATH
(or your system's
equivalent), so there should be no need for -R or -rpath
Variables such as CPICFLAGS
are determined where possible by
. Some systems allows two types of PIC flags, for
example '-fpic' and '-fPIC', and if they differ the first allows
only a limited number of symbols in a shared object. Since R as a shared
library has about 6200 symbols, if in doubt use the larger version.
To compile a profiling version of R, one might for example want to use 'MAIN_CFLAGS=-pg', 'MAIN_FFLAGS=-pg', 'MAIN_LDFLAGS=-pg' on platforms where '-pg' cannot be used with position-independent code.
Beware: it may be necessary to set CFLAGS
and FFLAGS
in ways compatible with the libraries to be used: one possible issue is the
alignment of doubles, another is the way structures are passed.
On some platforms configure
will select additional flags for
in R_XTRA_CFLAGS
(and so on). These are for options
which are always required, for example to force IEC 60559
There are several files that are part of the R sources but can be
re-generated from their own sources by configuring with option
--enable-maintainer-mode and then running make
in the
build directory. This requires other tools to be installed, discussed in
the rest of this section.
File configure is created from configure.ac and the files
under m4 by autoconf
and aclocal
. There is a
formal version requirement on autoconf
of 2.62 or later, but it is
unlikely that anything other than the most recent versions have been
thoroughly tested.
File src/include/config.h is created by autoheader
Grammar files *.y are converted to C sources by an implementation of
, usually bison -y
: these are found in
src/main and src/library/tools/src. It is known that earlier
versions of bison
generate code which reads (and in some cases
writes) outside array bounds: bison
2.6.1 was found to be
The ultimate sources for package compiler are in its noweb
directory. To re-create the sources from
src/library/compiler/noweb/compiler.nw, the command
is required. This is likely to need to be installed from
the sources at https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/noweb/ (and can also be
found on CTAN). The package sources are only re-created even in maintainer
mode if src/library/compiler/noweb/compiler.nw has been updated.
It is likely that in future creating configure
will need the GNU
'autoconf archive' installed. This can be found at
https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf-archive/ and as a package
(usually called autoconf-archive) in most packaged distributions, for
example Debian, Fedora, OpenCSW, Homebrew and MacPorts.
This section provides some notes on building R on different Unix-alike platforms. These notes are based on tests run on one or two systems in each case with particular sets of compilers and support libraries. Success in building R depends on the proper installation and functioning of support software; your results may differ if you have other versions of compilers and support libraries.
Older versions of this manual (for R < 2.10.0) contain notes on platforms such as HP-UX, IRIX and Alpha/OSF1 for which we have had no recent reports.
C macros to select particular platforms can be tricky to track down (there is a fair amount of misinformation on the Web). The Wiki (currently) at http://sourceforge.net/p/predef/wiki/Home/ can be helpful. The R sources currently use
AIX: _AIX Cygwin: __CYGWIN__ FreeBSD: __FreeBSD__ HP-UX: __hpux__, __hpux IRIX: sgi, __sgi Linux: __linux__ OS X: __APPLE__ NetBSD: __NetBSD__ OpenBSD: __OpenBSD__ Solaris: __sun, sun Windows: _WIN32, _WIN64
The 'X11()' graphics device is the one started automatically on Unix-alikes when plotting. As its name implies, it displays on a (local or remote) X server, and relies on the services provided by the X server.
The 'modern' version of the 'X11()' device is based on 'cairo' graphics and (in most implementations) uses 'fontconfig' to pick and render fonts. This is done on the server, and although there can be selection issues, they are more amenable than the issues with 'X11()' discussed in the rest of this section.
When X11 was designed, most displays were around 75dpi, whereas today they are of the order of 100dpi or more. If you find that X11() is reporting52 missing font sizes, especially larger ones, it is likely that you are not using scalable fonts and have not installed the 100dpi versions of the X11 fonts. The names and details differ by system, but will likely have something like Fedora's
xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic
and you need to ensure that the '-100dpi' versions are installed and on
the X11 font path (check via xset -q
). The 'X11()' device
does try to set a pointsize and not a pixel size: laptop users may find the
default setting of 12 too large (although very frequently laptop screens are
set to a fictitious dpi to appear like a scaled-down desktop screen).
More complicated problems can occur in non-Western-European locales, so if
you are using one, the first thing to check is that things work in the
locale. The likely issues are a failure to find any fonts or
glyphs being rendered incorrectly (often as a pair of ASCII
characters). X11 works by being asked for a font specification and coming
up with its idea of a close match. For text (as distinct from the symbols
used by plotmath), the specification is the first element of the option
which defaults to
If you are using a single-byte encoding, for example ISO 8859-2 in Eastern
Europe or KOI8-R in Russian, use xlsfonts
to find an appropriate
family of fonts in your encoding (the last field in the listing). If you
find none, it is likely that you need to install further font packages, such
as 'xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi' and 'xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic'
shown in the listing above.
Multi-byte encodings (most commonly UTF-8) are even more complicated. There are few fonts in 'iso10646-1', the Unicode encoding, and they only contain a subset of the available glyphs (and are often fixed-width designed for use in terminals). In such locales fontsets are used, made up of fonts encoded in other encodings. If the locale you are using has an entry in the 'XLC_LOCALE' directory (typically /usr/share/X11/locale, it is likely that all you need to do is to pick a suitable font specification that has fonts in the encodings specified there. If not, you may have to get hold of a suitable locale entry for X11. This may mean that, for example, Japanese text can be displayed when running in 'ja_JP.UTF-8' but not when running in 'en_GB.UTF-8' on the same machine (although on some systems many UTF-8 X11 locales are aliased to 'en_US.UTF-8' which covers several character sets, e.g. ISO 8859-1 (Western European), JISX0208 (Kanji), KSC5601 (Korean), GB2312 (Chinese Han) and JISX0201 (Kana)).
On some systems scalable fonts are available covering a wide range of glyphs. One source is TrueType/OpenType fonts, and these can provide high coverage. Another is Type 1 fonts: the URW set of Type 1 fonts provides standard typefaces such as Helvetica with a larger coverage of Unicode glyphs than the standard X11 bitmaps, including Cyrillic. These are generally not part of the default install, and the X server may need to be configured to use them. They might be under the X11 fonts directory or elsewhere, for example,
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 /usr/share/fonts/ja/TrueType
Linux is the main development platform for R, so compilation from the sources is normally straightforward with the standard compilers.
Remember that some package management systems (such as RPM and
deb) make a distinction between the user version of a package and the
developer version. The latter usually has the same name but with the
extension '-devel' or '-dev': you need both versions installed.
So please check the configure
output to see if the expected features
are detected: if for example 'readline' is missing add the developer
package. (On most systems you will also need 'ncurses' and its
developer package, although these should be dependencies of the
'readline' package(s).) You should expect to see in the
Interfaces supported: X11, tcltk External libraries: readline, zlib, bzlib, lzma, PCRE, curl Additional capabilities: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, NLS, cairo, ICU
When R has been installed from a binary distribution there are sometimes problems with missing components such as the FORTRAN compiler. Searching the 'R-help' archives will normally reveal what is needed.
It seems that 'ix86' Linux accepts non-PIC code in shared libraries,
but this is not necessarily so on other platforms, in particular on 64-bit
CPUs such as 'x86_64'. So care can be needed with
BLAS libraries and when building R as a shared library to
ensure that position-independent code is used in any static libraries (such
as the Tcl/Tk libraries, libpng
, libjpeg
and zlib
which might be linked against. Fortunately these are normally built as
shared libraries with the exception of the ATLAS BLAS libraries.
The default optimization settings chosen for CFLAGS
etc are
conservative. It is likely that using -mtune will result in
significant performance improvements on recent CPUs (especially for
'ix86'): one possibility is to add -mtune=native for the
best possible performance on the machine on which R is being installed:
if the compilation is for a site-wide installation, it may still be
desirable to use something like -mtume=core2.53
It is also possible to increase the optimization levels to -O3:
however for many versions of the compilers this has caused problems in at
least one CRAN package.
For platforms with both 64- and 32-bit support, it is likely that
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib64 -L/usr/local/lib"
is appropriate since most (but not all) software installs its 64-bit libraries in /usr/local/lib64. To build a 32-bit version of R on 'x86_64' with Fedora 21 we used
CC="gcc -m32" CXX="g++ -m32" F77="gfortran -m32" FC=${F77} OBJC=${CC} LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" LIBnn=lib
Note the use of 'LIBnn': 'x86_64' Fedora installs its 64-bit
software in /usr/lib64 and 32-bit software in /usr/lib.
Linking will skip over inappropriate binaries, but for example the 32-bit
Tcl/Tk configure scripts are in /usr/lib. It may also be necessary
to set the pkg-config
path, e.g. by
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
64-bit versions of Linux are built with support for files > 2Gb, and 32-bit versions will be if possible unless --disable-largefile is specified.
To build a 64-bit version of R on 'ppc64' (also known as
'powerpc64') with gcc
4.1.1, Ei-ji Nakama used
CC="gcc -m64" CXX="gxx -m64" F77="gfortran -m64" FC="gfortran -m64" CFLAGS="-mminimal-toc -fno-optimize-sibling-calls -g -O2" FFLAGS="-mminimal-toc -fno-optimize-sibling-calls -g -O2"
the additional flags being needed to resolve problems linking against libnmath.a and when linking R as a shared library.
R has been built with Linux 'ix86' and 'x86_64' C and C++
compilers (http://clang.llvm.org) based on the Clang front-ends,
invoked by CC=clang CXX=clang++
, together with gfortran
These take very similar options to the corresponding GCC compilers.
This has to be used in conjunction with a Fortran compiler: the
code will remove -lgcc from FLIBS
, which
is needed for some versions of gfortran
The current default for clang++
is to use the C++ runtime from the
installed g++
. Using the runtime from the libc++
(http://libcxx.llvm.org/) has also been tested: for some R packages
only the variant using libcxxabi
was successful.
Most builds of clang
have no OpenMP support. Builds of version
3.7.0 or later may.54
Intel compilers have been used under 'ix86' and 'x86_64' Linux. Brian Ripley used version 9.0 of the compilers for 'x86_64' on Fedora Core 5 with
CC=icc CFLAGS="-g -O3 -wd188 -ip -mp" F77=ifort FLAGS="-g -O3 -mp" CXX=icpc CXXFLAGS="-g -O3 -mp" FC=ifort FCFLAGS="-g -O3 -mp" ICC_LIBS=/opt/compilers/intel/cce/9.1.039/lib IFC_LIBS=/opt/compilers/intel/fce/9.1.033/lib LDFLAGS="-L$ICC_LIBS -L$IFC_LIBS -L/usr/local/lib64" SHLIB_CXXLD=icpc
will add '-c99' to CC
for C99-compliance.
This causes warnings with icc
10 and later, so use CC="icc
there. The flag -wd188 suppresses a large number of
warnings about the enumeration type 'Rboolean'. Because the Intel C
compiler sets '__GNUC__' without complete emulation of gcc
we suggest adding CPPFLAGS=-no-gcc
To maintain correct IEC 60559 arithmetic you most likely need
add flags to CFLAGS
and CXXFLAGS
such as
-mp (shown above) or -fp-model precise -fp-model source,
depending on the compiler version.
Others have reported success with versions 10.x and 11.x. % https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2015-September/071717.html Bjørn-Helge Mevik reported success with version 2015.3 of the compilers, using (for a SandyBridge CPU on Centos 6.x)
fast="-fp-model precise -ip -O3 -opt-mem-layout-trans=3 -xHost -mavx" CC=icc CFLAGS="$fast -wd188" F77=ifort FFLAGS="$fast" CXX=icpc CXXFLAGS="$fast" FC=$F77 FCFLAGS=$F77FLAGS
Brian Ripley tested the Sun Studio 12 compilers, since renamed to Oracle Solaris Studio. On 'x86_64' Linux with
CC=suncc CFLAGS="-xO5 -xc99 -xlibmil -nofstore" CPICFLAGS=-Kpic F77=sunf95 FFLAGS="-O5 -libmil -nofstore" FPICFLAGS=-Kpic CXX="sunCC -library=stlport4" CXXFLAGS="-xO5 -xlibmil -nofstore -features=tmplrefstatic" CXXPICFLAGS=-Kpic FC=sunf95 FCFLAGS=$FFLAGS FCPICFLAGS=-Kpic LDFLAGS=-L/opt/sunstudio12.1/rtlibs/amd64 SHLIB_LDFLAGS=-shared SHLIB_CXXLDFLAGS=-G SHLIB_FCLDFLAGS=-G SAFE_FFLAGS="-O5 -libmil"
-m64 could be added, but was the default. Do not use -fast: see the warnings under Solaris. (The C++ options are also explained under Solaris.)
Others have found on at least some versions of 'ix86' Linux that the
configure flag --disable-largefile was needed (since glob.h
on that platform presumed gcc
was being used).
The instructions here are for 'x86_64' builds on 10.9 (Mavericks) or later. In principle55 R can be built for 10.6 to 10.8 but these has not been tested recently.
To build R you need Apple's 'Command Line Tools': these can be
(re-)installed by xcode-select --install
. (If you have a fresh
installation, running e.g. make
in a terminal will offer the
installation of the command-line tools. If you have installed Xcode, this
provides the command-line tools.)
You need readline
(or to configure using
--without-readline), and a Fortran compiler. Those and other
binary components are available from https://r.research.att.com/libs:
you are likely to need pcre
and xz
(recent OS X provides libs
but not headers for these).
An X sub-system is required unless configuring using --without-x: see https://xquartz.macosforge.org/.
To use the quartz()
graphics device you need to configure with
--with-aqua (which is the default): quartz()
then becomes
the default device when running R at the console and X11 would only be
used for the command-line-R data editor/viewer and one version of
Tcl/Tk. (This needs an Objective-C compiler56 which can compile the source code of
Use --without-aqua if you want a standard Unix-alike build: apart
from disabling quartz()
and the ability to use the build with
R.APP, it also changes the default location of the personal library (see
). Also use --disable-R-framework to install in
the standard layout.
Various compilers can be used. The current CRAN 'Mavericks' distribution of R is built using
CC=clang CXX=clang++ F77=gfortran-4.8 FC=$F77 OBJC=clang CFLAGS=-Wall -mtune=core2 -g -O2 CXXFLAGS=-Wall -mtune=core2 -g -O2' OBJCFLAGS=-Wall -mtune=core2 -g -O2 F77FLAGS=-Wall -g -O2 FCFLAGS=$F77FLAGS
with clang
and clang++
from the 'Command Line Tools' and
the Fortran compiler from
Other builds of gfortran
are available: see
https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries and
http://coudert.name/software.html. To use one of these with a binary
distribution of R you will probably need to specify the name or path in a
personal or site Makevars file (see Customizing package compilation).
More recent and complete distributions of clang
are usually
available from http://llvm.org/releases/. In particular, these
include support for the 'Address Sanitizer' (not included by Apple until
Xcode 7) and for OpenMP58 in version 3.7.0 and later.
Pre-compiled versions of many of the Useful libraries and programs are
available from https://r.research.att.com/libs/. You will most
likely want at least jpeg
and tiff
. pkg-config
is not
provided by Apple and used for many packages: it will also be used if
present when configuring the X11()
and bitmap devices.
Support for cairo
(without Pango
) can be enabled in two ways:
both need pkg-config
available. XQuartz ships cairo
and its
version will be selected if its pkg-config
files are first on the
configuration path: for example by setting
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/X11/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig
or appending that variable to the configure
command. Otherwise
the binary libraries at https://r.research.att.com/libs/ can be used:
, fontconfig
, freetype
, pixman
pkgconfig-system-stubs-darwin13.tar.gz are needed, plus libpng
for PNG support.
The Accelerate
library can be used via the configuration
--with-blas="-framework Accelerate" --with-lapack
to provide potentially higher-performance versions of the BLAS and LAPACK routines.59
Looking at the top of /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/etc/Makeconf will show the compilers and configuration options used for the CRAN binary package for R: at the time of writing
was used.
Configure option --with-internal-tzcode is the default on OS X, as
the system implementation of time zones does not work correctly for times
before 1902 or after 2037 (despite using a 64-bit time_t
The TeX implementation used by the developers is MacTeX (https://www.tug.org/mactex/): the full installation is about 4GB, but a smaller version is available at https://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html: you will need to add some packages, e.g. for the 2015 version we needed to add cm-super, helvetic, inconsolata and texinfo which brought this to about 410MB. 'TeX Live Utility' (available via the MacTeX front page) provides a graphical means to manage TeX packages.
One OS X quirk is that the default path has /usr/local/bin after /usr/bin, contrary to common practice on Unix-alikes. This means that if you install tools from the sources they will by default be installed under /usr/local and not supersede the system versions.
If you upgrade your OS you should re-install any of XQuartz, the 'Command Line Tools' and Java which you have installed. (Upgrading may partially remove previous versions which can be confusing.)
[This is provisional information about OS X 10.11 aka El Capitan as it is not yet released.]
There are likely to be problems from the restriction that only Apple is
allowed to install software under /usr: this affects inter
alia MacTeX
and XQuartz
. For MacTeX
it is necessary
to include /Library/TeX/texbin in your path rather the
may need to be told to look for X11
's main location of /opt/X11, e.g. by
--x-includes=/opt/X11/include --x-libraries=/opt/X11/lib
It may be necessary to replace /usr/X11 by /opt/X11 in file
/usr/local/lib/tkConfig.sh, and to use install_name_tool
adjust /usr/local/lib/libtk8.6.dylib to link to libraries under
/opt/X11 rather than /usr/X11.
If you plan to use the tcltk
package for R, you need to install a
distribution of Tcl/Tk. There are two alternatives. If you use R.APP you
will want to use X11-based Tcl/Tk (as used on other Unix-alikes), which is
installed as part of the CRAN binary for R. This may need
--with-tcl-config=/usr/local/lib/tclConfig.sh --with-tk-config=/usr/local/lib/tkConfig.sh
Note that this requires a matching XQuartz installation.
There is also a native ('Aqua') version of Tcl/Tk which produces widgets in the native OS X style: this will not work with R.APP because of conflicts over the OS X menu, but for those only using command-line R this provides a much more intuitive interface to Tk for experienced Mac users. Most versions of OS X come with Aqua Tcl/Tk libraries, but these are not at all recent versions of Tcl/Tk (8.5.9 in Yosemite). It is better to install Tcl/Tk 8.6.x from the sources or a binary distribution from https://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads. Configure R with
--with-tcl-config=/Library/Frameworks/Tcl.framework/tclConfig.sh --with-tk-config=/Library/Frameworks/Tk.framework/tkConfig.sh
(for the versions bundled with OS X, use paths starting with /System/Library).
If you need to find out which distribution of Tk is in use at run time, use
library(tcltk) tclvalue(.Tcl("tk windowingsystem")) # "x11" or "aqua"
The situation with Java support on OS X is messy.60
OS X no longer comes with an installed Java runtime (JRE), and an OS X
upgrade removes one if already installed: it is intended to be installed at
first use. Check if a JRE is installed by running java -version
in a Terminal
window: if Java is not installed this should prompt
you to install it. You can also install directly the latest Java from
Oracle (currently from
You may need to install what Apple calls 'legacy Java'61 to suppress pop-up messages, even if you have a current version installed.
To see what compatible versions of Java are currently installed, run
/usr/libexec/java_home -V -a x86_64
. If needed, set the
environment variable JAVA_HOME
to choose between these, both when R
is built from the sources and when R CMD javareconf
is run.
Configuring and building R both looks for a JRE and for support for compiling JNI programs (used by packages rJava and JavaGD); the latter requires a JDK (Java SDK) and not just a JRE.
The build process tries to fathom out what JRE/JDK to use, but it may need
some help, e.g. by setting JAVA_HOME
. An Apple JRE can be specified
explicitly by something like
JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Headers" JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH= JAVA_LIBS="-framework JavaVM"
The Oracle JDK can be specified explicitly by something like
JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_51.jdk/Contents/Home JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I/${JAVA_HOME}/include -I/${JAVA_HOME}/include/darwin" JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${JAVA_HOME}/jre/lib/server" JAVA_LIBS="-L/${JAVA_HOME}/jre/lib/server -ljvm"
in config.site.
Note that it is necessary to set the environment variable NOAWT
to install many of the Java-using packages.
The CRAN build of R is installed as a framework, which is selected by the default option
./configure --enable-R-framework
(This is intended to be used with an Apple toolchain: other compilers may not support frameworks correctly.)
It is only needed if you want to build R for use with the R.APP console, and implies --enable-R-shlib to build R as a dynamic library. This option configures R to be built and installed as a framework called R.framework. The default installation path for R.framework is /Library/Frameworks but this can be changed at configure time by specifying the flag --enable-R-framework[=DIR] or at install time as
make prefix=/where/you/want/R.framework/to/go install
Note that installation as a framework is non-standard (especially to a
non-standard location) and Unix utilities may not support it (e.g. the
file libR.pc will be put somewhere unknown to
Note that building the R.APP GUI console is a separate project, using Xcode. Before compiling R.APP make sure the current version of R is installed in /Library/Frameworks/R.framework and working at the command-line (this can be a binary install).
The current sources can be checked out by
svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/Mac-GUI
and built by loading the R.xcodeproj
project (select the R
target and a suitable configuration), or from the command-line by e.g.
xcodebuild -target R -configuration Release
See also the INSTALL file in the checkout or directly at https://svn.r-project.org/R-packages/trunk/Mac-GUI/INSTALL.
R.APP does not need to be installed in any specific way. Building R.APP results in the R.APP bundle which appears as one R icon. This application bundle can be run anywhere and it is customary to place it in the /Applications folder.
R has been built successfully on Solaris 10 (both Sparc and
'x86') using the (zero cost) Oracle Solaris Studio compilers: there
has been some success with gcc
. (Recent
Sun machines are AMD Opterons or Intel Xeons ('amd64') rather than
'x86', but 32-bit 'x86' executables are the default.)
There have been few reports on Solaris 11, with no known extra issues. Solaris 9 and earlier are now so old that it is unlikely that R is still used with them, and they will not be considered here.
The Solaris versions of several of the tools needed to build R (e.g.
, ar
and ld
) are in /usr/ccs/bin,
so if using those tools ensure this is in your path. A version of the
preferred GNU tar
is (if installed) in
/usr/sfw/bin. It may be necessary to avoid the tools in
/usr/ucb: POSIX-compliant versions of some tools can be found in
/usr/xpg4/bin and /usr/xpg6/bin.
A large selection of Open Source software can be installed from
https://www.opencsw.org, by default installed under /opt/csw.
Solaris 10 ships with bzlib
version 1.0.6 (sufficient for the default
--with-system-bzlib) but zlib
version 1.2.3 (too old for
--with-system-zlib): OpenCSW has 1.2.8.
You will need GNU libiconv
and readline
: the Solaris
version of iconv
is not sufficiently powerful.
The native make
suffices to build R but a small number of
packages require GNU make
(some without good reason and
without declaring it as 'SystemRequirements' in the DESCRIPTION
Some people have reported that the Solaris libintl
needs to be
avoided, for example by using --disable-nls or
--with-included-gettext or using libintl
from OpenCSW. (On
the other hand, there have been many successful installs which automatically
detected libintl
from OpenCSW or selected the included
The support for the C99 long double
type on Sparc hardware uses
quad-precision arithmetic, and this is usually slow because it is done by
software emulation. On such systems the configure
--disable-long-double can be used for faster but less accurate
The Solaris time-zone conversion services seem to be unreliable pre-1916 in
Europe (when daylight-savings time was first introduced): most often
reporting in the non-existent DST variant. Using configure
--with-internal-tzcode is recommended, and required if you find
time-zone abbreviations being given odd values (as has been seen on 64-bit
builds without it).
When using the Oracle compilers62 do not specify -fast, as this disables
IEEE arithmetic and make check
will fail.
It has been reported that some Solaris installations need
INTERNET_LIBS="-lsocket -lnsl"
on the configure
command line or in file config.site;
however, there have been many successful installs without this.
A little juggling of paths was needed to ensure GNU
(in /usr/local) was used rather than the Solaris
CC="cc -xc99" CFLAGS="-O -xlibmieee" F77=f95 FFLAGS=-O CXX="CC -library=stlport4" CXXFLAGS=-O FC=f95 FCFLAGS=$FFLAGS FCLIBS="-lfai -lfsu" R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib:/opt/csw/gcc4/lib:/opt/csw/lib"
For a 64-bit target add -m64 to the compiler macros and use
something like LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib/sparcv9
as appropriate. It will also be
necessary to point pkg-config
at the 64-bit directories, e.g.
one of
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/amd64/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/amd64/pkgconfig PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/csw/lib/sparcv9/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/sparcv9/pkgconfig
and to specify a 64-bit Java VM by e.g.
JAVA_CPPFLAGS="-I${JAVA_HOME}/../include -I${JAVA_HOME}/../include/solaris" JAVA_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64/server JAVA_LIBS="-L${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64/server \ -R${JAVA_HOME}/lib/amd64/server -ljvm"
With Solaris Studio 12.[23] on Sparc, FCLIBS
needs to be
FCLIBS="-lfai -lfai2 -lfsu"
(and possibly other Fortran libraries, but this suffices for the packages currently on CRAN).
Currently 'amd64' and 'sparcv9' builds work out-of-the-box
with Sun Studio 12u1 but not Solaris Studio 12.2 and 12.3:
libRblas.so and lapack.so are generated with code that causes
relocation errors (which is being linked in from the Fortran libraries).
This means that building 64-bit R as a shared library may be impossible
with Solaris Studio >= 12.2. For a standard build the trick seems to be to
manually set FLIBS
to avoid the troublesome libraries. For example,
on 'amd64' set in config.site something like
FLIBS_IN_SO="-R/opt/solarisstudio12.3/lib/amd64 /opt/solarisstudio12.3/lib/amd64/libfui.so /opt/solarisstudio12.3/lib/amd64/libfsu.so"
For 64-bit Sparc, set in config.site something like
FLIBS="-R/opt/solarisstudio12.3/prod/lib/sparc/64 -lifai -lsunimath -lfai -lfai2 -lfsumai -lfprodai -lfminlai -lfmaxlai -lfminvai -lfmaxvai -lfui -lsunmath -lmtsk /opt/solarisstudio12.3/prod/lib/sparc/64/libfsu.so.1"
By default the Solaris Studio compilers do not by default conform to the C99
standard (appendix F 8.9) on the return values of functions such as
: use -xlibmieee to ensure this.
You can target specific Sparc architectures for (slightly) higher
performance: -xtarget=native (in CFLAGS
etc) tunes the
compilation to the current machine.
Using -xlibmil
in CFLAGS
and -xlibmil
in FFLAGS
allows more system mathematical functions to be inlined.
On 'x86' you will get marginally higher performance via
CFLAGS="-xO5 -xc99 -xlibmieee -xlibmil -nofstore -xtarget=native" FFLAGS="-O5 -libmil -nofstore -xtarget=native" CXXFLAGS="-xO5 -xlibmil -nofstore -xtarget=native" SAFE_FFLAGS="-libmil -fstore -xtarget=native"
but the use of -nofstore
can be less numerically stable, and some
packages (notably mgcv on 'x86') failed to compile at
higher optimization levels with version 12.3.
The Solaris Studio compilers provide several implementations of the C++98 standard which select both the set of headers and a C++ runtime library. These are selected by the -library flag, which as it is needed for both compiling and linking is best specified as part of the compiler. The examples above use 'stlport4', currently the most modern of the options: the default (but still needed to be specified as it is needed for linking) is 'Cstd': see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/cmp-stlport-libcstd-142559.html. Note though that most external Solaris C++ libraries will have been built with 'Cstd' and so an R package using such libraries also needs to be. Occasionally the option -library=stlport4,Crun has been needed.
Several CRAN packages using C++ need the more liberal interpretation given by adding
The performance library sunperf
is available for use with the Solaris
Studio compilers. If selected as a BLAS, it must also be selected
as LAPACK via (for Solaris Studio 12.2 and later)
./configure --with-blas='-library=sunperf' --with-lapack
This has often given test failures in the past, in several different
places. At the time of writing it fails in tests/reg-BLAS.R, and on
some builds, including for 'amd64', it fails in
Parsing very complex R expressions needs a lot of stack space when the Oracle compilers are used: several packages require the stack increased to at least 20MB.
If using gcc
, ensure that the compiler was compiled for the
version of Solaris in use. (This can be ascertained from gcc -v
makes modified versions of some header files, and several
reports of problems were due to using gcc
compiled on one version
of Solaris on a later version.
The notes here are for gcc
set up to use the Solaris linker: it
can also be set up to use GNU ld
, but that has not been tested.
Compilation for a 32-bit Sparc target with gcc
4.9.2 needed
CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/csw/include LDFLAGS="-L/opt/csw/gcc4/lib -L/opt/csw/lib"
and for a 64-bit Sparc target
CC="gcc -m64" F77="gfortran -m64" CXX="g++ -m64" FC=$F77 CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/csw/include LDFLAGS="-L/opt/csw/gcc4/lib/sparcv9 -L/opt/csw/lib/sparcv9"
Note that paths such as /opt/csw/gcc4/lib/sparcv9 may need to be in
during configuration.
The compilation can be tuned to a particular cpu: the CRAN check
system uses -mtune=niagara2
Compilation for an 'x86' target with gcc
4.9.2 needed
CC="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/gcc -m32" CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/csw/include -I/usr/local/include" F77="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/gfortran -m32" CXX="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/g++ -m32" FC="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/gfortran -m32" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/csw/gcc4/lib -L/opt/csw/lib -L/usr/local/lib"
is needed since TeXLive was built using 32-bit
, and we need /opt/csw/lib in R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH
For an 'amd64' target with gcc
4.9.2 we used
CC="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/gcc -m64" CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/csw/include -I/usr/local/include" F77="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/gfortran -m64" FPICFLAGS=-fPIC CXX="/opt/csw/gcc4/bin/g++ -m64" FC=$F77 FCPICFLAGS=$FPICFLAGS LDFLAGS="-L/opt/csw/gcc4/lib/amd64 -L/opt/csw/lib/amd64"
We no longer support AIX prior to 4.2, and configure
will throw an
error on such systems.
Ei-ji Nakama was able to build under AIX 5.2 on 'powerpc' with GCC 4.0.3 in several configurations. 32-bit versions could be configured with --without-iconv as well as --enable-R-shlib. For 64-bit versions he used
OBJECT_MODE=64 CC="gcc -maix64" CXX="g++ -maix64" F77="gfortran -maix64" FC="gfortran -maix64"
and was also able to build with the IBM xlc
and Hitachi f90
compilers by
OBJECT_MODE=64 CC="xlc -q64" CXX="g++ -maix64" F77="f90 -cpu=pwr4 -hf77 -parallel=0 -i,L -O3 -64" FC="f90 -cpu=pwr4 -hf77 -parallel=0 -i,L -O3 -64" FLIBS="-L/opt/ofort90/lib -lhf90vecmath -lhf90math -lf90"
Some systems have f95
as an IBM compiler that does not by default
accept FORTRAN 77. It needs the flag -qfixed=72, or to be invoked
as xlf_r
The AIX native iconv
does not support encodings 'latin1' nor
'""' and so cannot be used. (As far as we know GNU
could be installed.)
Fan Long reported success on AIX 5.3 using
OBJECT_MODE=64 LIBICONV=/where/libiconv/installed CC="xlc_r -q64" CFLAGS="-O -qstrict" CXX="xlC_r -q64" CXXFLAGS="-O -qstrict" F77="xlf_r -q64" AR="ar -X64" CPPFLAGS="-I$LIBICONV/include -I/usr/lpp/X11/include/X11" LDFLAGS="-L$LIBICONV/lib -L/usr/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib"
On one AIX 6.x system it was necessary to use R_SHELL
to set the
default shell to be Bash rather than Zsh.
Kurt Hornik and Stefan Theussl at WU (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien) successfully built R on a 'powerpc' (8-CPU Power6 system) running AIX 6.1, configuring with or without --enable-R-shlib (Ei-ji Nakama's support is gratefully acknowledged).
It helps to describe the WU build environment first. A small part of the
software needed to build R and/or install packages is available directly
from the AIX Installation DVDs, e.g., Java 6 and X11. Additional open
source software (OSS) is packaged for AIX in .rpm files and available
from both IBM's "AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications"
and http://www.oss4aix.org/download/. The latter website typically
offers more recent versions of the available OSS. All tools needed and
libraries downloaded from these repositories (e.g., GCC, Make,
, etc.) are typically installed to /opt/freeware,
hence corresponding executables are found in
/opt/freeware/bin which thus needs to be in PATH
for using
these tools. As on other Unix systems one needs GNU
as the AIX version of iconv is not sufficiently powerful.
Additionally, for proper Unicode compatibility one should install the
corresponding package from the ICU project
(http://www.icu-project.org/download/), which offers pre-compiled
binaries for various platforms which in case of AIX can be installed via
unpacking the tarball to the root file system. For full LaTeX support
one can install the TeX Live DVD distribution
(https://www.tug.org/texlive/): it is recommended to update the
distribution using the tlmgr
update manager. For 64-bit R builds
supporting Tcl/Tk this needs to installed from the sources as available
pre-compiled binaries supply only 32-bit shared objects.
The recent WU testing was done using compilers from both the GNU Compiler Collection (version 4.2.4) which is available from one of the above OSS repositories, and the IBM C/C++ (XL C/C++ 10.01) as well as FORTRAN (XL Fortran 12.01) compilers (http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/byproduct.jsp#X).
To compile for a 64-bit 'powerpc' (Power6 CPU) target one can use
CC ="gcc -maix64 -pthread" CXX="g++ -maix64 -pthread" FC="gfortran -maix64 -pthread" F77="gfortran -maix64 -pthread" CFLAGS="-O2 -g -mcpu=power6" FFLAGS="-O2 -g -mcpu=power6" FCFLAGS="-O2 -g -mcpu=power6"
for the GCC and
CC=xlc CXX=xlc++ FC=xlf F77=xlf CFLAGS="-qarch=auto -qcache=auto -qtune=auto -O3 -qstrict -ma" FFLAGS="-qarch=auto -qcache=auto -qtune=auto -O3 -qstrict" FCFLAGS="-qarch=auto -qcache=auto -qtune=auto -O3 -qstrict" CXXFLAGS="-qarch=auto -qcache=auto -qtune=auto -O3 -qstrict"
for the IBM XL compilers. For the latter, it is important to note that the
decision for generating 32-bit or 64-bit code is done by setting the
environment variable appropriately (recommended) or using
an additional compiler flag (-q32 or -q64). By default
the IBM XL compilers produce 32 bit code. Thus, to build R with 64-bit
support one needs to either export OBJECT_MODE=64
in the environment
or, alternatively, use the -q64 compiler options.
It is strongly recommended to install Bash and use it as the configure
shell, e.g., via setting CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/bin/bash
in the
environment, and to use GNU Make (e.g., via
Further installation instructions to set up a proper R development environment can be found in the "R on AIX" project on R-Forge (https://R-Forge.R-project.org/projects/aix/).
There have been few recent reports on FreeBSD.
There is a 'port' at https://www.freebsd.org/ports/math.html, for R 3.0.2 at the time of writing. Davor Cubranic reported some success on x86_64 FreeBSD 10.2 for R 3.2.2.
It appears that versions of FreeBSD using clang
as the compiler
(the default as from 10.0) need
for R releases up to 3.2.2.
Use of ICU for collation and the configure
--with-internal-tzcode are desirable workarounds.
Ingo Feinerer installed R version 3.2.2 on OpenBSD 5.8 arch 'amd64' (their name for 'x86_64'). Details of the build (and patches applied) are at http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/math/R/.
The Cygwin emulation layer on Windows can be treated as a Unix-alike OS. This is unsupported, but experiments have been conducted and a few workarounds added. Cygwin has not been tested for R 3.0.0 or later.
The 64-bit version is completely unsupported. The 32-bit version has never
worked well enough to pass R's make check
R requires C99 complex type support, which is available as from Cygwin
1.7.8 (March 2011). However, the (then) implementation of cacos
incorrect results, so we undefine HAVE_CACOS
src/main/complex.c on that platform. It has been reported that some
C99 long double mathematical functions are missing, so configuring with
--disable-long-double was required.
Only building as a shared library can possibly work,63 so use e.g.
./configure --disable-nls --enable-R-shlib FLIBS=-lgfortran make
Enabling NLS does work if required, although adding --with-included-gettext is preferable. You will see many warnings about the use of auto-import. Setting 'FLIBS' explicitly seems needed currently as the auto-detection gives an incorrect value.
You will need the tetex-extra Cygwin package to build NEWS.pdf and the vignettes.
Note that this gives you a command-line application using readline
for command editing. The 'X11' graphics device will work if a suitable
X server is running, and the standard Unix-alike ways of installing source
packages work. There was a bug in the /usr/lib/tkConfig.sh script in
the version we looked at, which needs to have
The overhead of using shell scripts makes this noticeably slower than a native build of R on Windows.
Even when R could be built, not all the tests passed: there were incorrect results from wide-character regular expressions code and from sourcing CR-delimited files.
Do not use Cygwin's BLAS library: it is known to give incorrect results.
There are a number of sources of problems when installing R on a new hardware/OS platform. These include
Floating Point Arithmetic: R requires arithmetic compliant with
IEC 60559, also known as IEEE 754. This
mandates the use of plus and minus infinity and NaN
(not a number) as
well as specific details of rounding. Although almost all current FPUs can
support this, selecting such support can be a pain. The problem is that
there is no agreement on how to set the signalling behaviour; Sun/Sparc,
SGI/IRIX and 'ix86' Linux require no special action, FreeBSD
requires a call to (the macro) fpsetmask(0)
and OSF1 required that
computation be done with a -ieee_with_inexact flag etc. On a new
platform you must find out the magic recipe and add some code to make it
work. This can often be done via the file config.site which resides
in the top level directory.
Beware of using high levels of optimization, at least initially. On many
compilers these reduce the degree of compliance to the IEEE
model. For example, using -fast on the Solaris Studio compilers
has caused R's NaN
to be set incorrectly, and gcc
-ffast-math and clang
's -Ofast have given
incorrect results.
Shared Objects: There seems to be very little agreement across
platforms on what needs to be done to build shared objects. there are many
different combinations of flags for the compilers and loaders.
GNU libtool cannot be used (yet), as it currently does not fully
support FORTRAN: one would need a shell wrapper for this). The technique we
use is to first interrogate the X window system about what it does (using
), and then override this in situations where we know better
(for tools from the GNU Compiler Collection and/or platforms we
know about). This typically works, but you may have to manually override
the results. Scanning the manual entries for cc
and ld
usually reveals the correct incantation. Once you know the recipe you can
modify the file config.site (following the instructions therein) so
that the build will use these options.
It seems that gcc
3.4.x and later on 'ix86' Linux
defeat attempts by the LAPACK code to avoid computations entirely in
extended-precision registers, so file src/modules/lapack/dlamc.f may
need to be compiled without optimization. Set the configure variable
to the flags to be used for this file. If configure
detects GNU FORTRAN it adds flag -ffloat-store to
. (Other settings are needed when using icc
'ix86' Linux, for example. Using -mpc64 is preferable on
more recent GCC compilers.)
If you do manage to get R running on a new platform please let us know about it so we can modify the configuration procedures to include that platform.
If you are having trouble getting R to work on your platform please feel free to use the 'R-devel' mailing list to ask questions. We have had a fair amount of practice at porting R to new platforms ...
If you want to build R or add-on packages from source in Windows, you will need to collect, install and test an extensive set of tools. See https://CRAN.R-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/ for the current locations and other updates to these instructions. (Most Windows users will not need to build add-on packages from source; see Add-on packages for details.)
We have found that the build process for R is quite sensitive to the choice of tools: please follow our instructions exactly, even to the choice of particular versions of the tools.64 The build process for add-on packages is somewhat more forgiving, but we recommend using the exact toolset at first, and only substituting other tools once you are familiar with the process.
This appendix contains a lot of prescriptive comments. They are here as a result of bitter experience. Please do not report problems to the R mailing lists unless you have followed all the prescriptions.
We have collected most of the necessary tools (unfortunately not all, due to license or size limitations) into an executable installer named65 Rtools31.exe, available from https://CRAN.R-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/. You should download and run it, choosing the default "Package authoring installation" to build add-on packages, or the "full installation" if you intend to build R.
You will need the following items to build R and packages. See the subsections below for detailed descriptions.
For installing simple source packages containing data or R source but no compiled code, none of these are needed.
A complete build of R including PDF manuals, and producing the installer will also need the following:
It is important to set your PATH
properly. The installer
Rtools*.exe optionally sets the path to components that it installs.
Your PATH
may include . first, then the bin directories
of the tools, the compiler toolchain and LaTeX. Do not use filepaths
containing spaces: you can always use the short forms (found by dir
at the Windows command line). Network shares (with paths starting
) are not supported.
For example for a 32-bit build, all on one line,
PATH=c:\Rtools\bin;c:\Rtools\gcc-4.6.3\bin;c:\MiKTeX\miktex\bin; c:\R\R-3.2\bin\i386;c:\windows;c:\windows\system32
It is essential that the directory containing the command line tools comes first or second in the path: there are typically like-named tools66 in other directories, and they will not work. The ordering of the other directories is less important, but if in doubt, use the order above.
Our toolset contains copies of Cygwin DLLs that may conflict with other ones on your system if both are in the path at once. The normal recommendation is to delete the older ones; however, at one time we found our tools did not work with a newer version of the Cygwin DLLs, so it may be safest not to have any other version of the Cygwin DLLs in your path.
The 'MiKTeX' (http://www.miktex.org/) distribution of LaTeX
includes a suitable port of pdftex
. This can be set up to install
extra packages 'on the fly', which is the simplest way to use it (and the
default). The 'basic' version of 'MiKTeX' almost suffices: when last
tested packages
epsf fancyvrb inconsolata listings mptopdf natbib url
needed to be added (on the fly or via the 'MiKTeX' Package Manager) to install R. In any case ensure that the inconsolata package is installed—you can check with the 'MiKTeX' Package Manager.
The Rtools*.exe installer does not include any version of LaTeX.
It is also possible to use the TeXLive distribution from https://www.tug.org/texlive/.
Please read Making the manuals about how to make fullrefman.pdf
and set the environment variable R_RD4PDF
suitably; ensure you have
the required fonts installed or that 'MiKTeX' is set up to install
LaTeX packages on first use.
To make the installer package ((3.3.0)-win.exe) we currently require the Unicode version of Inno Setup 5.3.7 or later from http://jrsoftware.org/. This is not included in Rtools*.exe.
Copy file src/gnuwin32/MkRules.dist to
src/gnuwin32/MkRules.local and edit it to set ISDIR
to the
location where Inno Setup was installed.
This item is installed by the Rtools*.exe installer.
If you choose to install these yourself, you will need suitable versions of
at least basename
, cat
, cmp
, comm
, cp
, date
, diff
, du
, echo
, expr
, ls
, make
, makeinfo
, mkdir
, rm
, rsync
, sed
, sh
, sort
, texindex
, touch
and uniq
; we use those from
the Cygwin distribution (https://www.cygwin.com/) or compiled from
the sources. You will also need zip
and unzip
from the
Info-ZIP project (http://www.info-zip.org/). All of these tools are
in Rtools*.exe.
Beware: 'Native' ports of make are not suitable (including
those called 'MinGW make' at the MinGW SourceForge site and
in some MinGW-w64 distributions). There were also
problems with other versions of the Cygwin tools and DLLs. To avoid
frustration, please use our tool set, and make sure it is at the front of
your path (including before the Windows system directories). If you are
using a Windows shell, type PATH
at the prompt to find out.
You may need to set the environment variable CYGWIN
to a value
including 'nodosfilewarning' to suppress messages about Windows-style
Technically you need more than just a compiler so the set of tools is referred to as a 'toolchain'.
The preferred toolchain is part of Rtools31.exe
: this uses a beta
version of gcc 4.6.3
and version 2.0.1 of the MinGW-w64 project's
This toolchain uses multilib: that is there is a single front-end
such as gcc.exe
for each of the compilers and 32-bit (the default)
and 64-bit compilation are selected by the flags67 -m32 and -m64 respectively. The tools are
all 32-bit Windows executables and should be able to run on any current
version of Windows—however you do need a 64-bit version of Windows to
build 64-bit R as the build process runs R.
To select a 32-bit or 64-bit build of R, set the options in MkRules.local appropriately (following the comments in the file).
Some external software libraries will need to be re-compiled under the new toolchain: especially those providing a C++ interface. Many of those used by CRAN packages are available from https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/multilib/. Users developing packages with Rcpp need to ensure that they use a version built with exactly the same toolchain as their package: the recommendation is to build Rcpp from its sources yourself.
There is support for OpenMP and pthreads in this toolchain. As the performance of OpenMP on Windows is poor for small tasks, it is not used for R itself.
The process of making the installer will make use of qpdf
to compact
some of the package vignettes, if it is available. Windows binaries of
are available from
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qpdf/files/. Set the path to
the qpdf
installation in file MkRules.local.
Developers of packages will find some of the 'goodies' at https://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/goodies useful.
There is a version of the file
command that identifies the type of
files, and is used by Rcmd check
if available. The binary
distribution is included in Rtools31.exe.
The file xzutils.zip contains the program xz
which can be
used to (de)compress files with that form of compression.
Jump to: | C I M R U |
Jump to: | C I M R U |
Jump to: | A B F I L M O P R S U V W |
Jump to: | A B F I L M O P R S U V W |
Jump to: | B C D F J L O P R T |
Jump to: | B C D F J L O P R T |
e.g. GNU tar
version 1.15 or later, or that from the 'libarchive' (as used on OS X
versions 10.6 and later) or 'Heirloom Toolchest' distributions.
for some Subversion clients 'http:' may appear to work, but requires continual redirection.
Most aspects will work with paths containing spaces, but
external software used by R, e.g. texi2dvi
, may not.
which use lib rather than lib64 for their primary 64-bit library directories.
Instructions on how to install the latest version are at https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/inconsolata/.
on a Unix-alike,
'inconsolata' is omitted if not found by configure
This will be needed if more than one sub-architecture is to be installed.
with possible values 'i386', 'x64', '32' and '64'.
mainly on RedHat and Fedora, whose layout is described here.
How to prepare such a directory is described in file src/extra/tzone/Notes in the R sources.
example, -fopenmp, -xopenmp or -qopenmp. This
includes for 2015 versions of clang
and the Intel C compiler.
Suitable distributions include Strawberry Perl, http://strawberryperl.com/ and ActivePerl, https://www.activestate.com/activeperl.
It seems that because of a security change in El Capitan earlier versions of the installer will fail there, but those as from R 3.2.2 are expected to work.
The installer
currently puts links to R
and Rscript
in /usr/bin
so these can be typed as commands. This will change to
/usr/local/bin under El Capitan and later.
It is recommended to remove those in /usr/bin before upgrading in-place to El Capitan as it may be hard to remove them later.
unless they were excluded in the build.
its binding is locked once the startup files have been read, so users cannot easily change it.
If a proxy needs to be set, see
for a small number of CRAN packages where this is known to be safe and is needed by the autobuilder this is the default. Look at the source of tools:::.install_packages for the list. It can also be specified in the package's DESCRIPTION file.
or by adding it in a file such as etc/i386/Makevars.site, which does not exist by default.
'X/Open Portability Guide', which has had several versions.
On some systems setting LC_ALL
to 'C' disables LANGUAGE
If you try changing from French to Russian except in a UTF-8 locale, you will most likely find messages change to English.
the language written in England: some people living in the USA appropriate this name for their language.
with Americanisms.
also known as IEEE 754
at least when storing quantities: the on-FPU precision is allowed to vary
e.g. Bessel, beta and gamma functions
including copying MkRules.dist to MkRule.local and selecting the architecture.
also known as IEEE 754
Note that
C11 compilers need not be C99-compliant: R requires support for
double complex
and variable-length arrays which are optional in C11
but is mandatory in C99.
-std=c99 excludes POSIX functionality, but config.h will turn on all GNU extensions to include the POSIX functionality. The default mode for GCC 5 is -std=gnu11.
However, it is possible to break the default behaviour
of glibc
by re-specifying the gconv
modules to be loaded.
specifically, the C99
functionality of headers wchar.h and wctype.h, types
and mbstate_t
and functions mbrtowc
, wcrtomb
, wcscoll
, wcstombs
, wctype
, and iswctype
including the opendir
, readdir
, popen
, stat
, glob
, access
and chdir
system calls, and either putenv
such as realpath
most often distributed as part of xz
possible names in Linux distributions include xz-devel
and liblzma-dev
and not PCRE2, which started at
version 10.0. PCRE must be built with UTF-8 support (not the default) and
support for Unicode properties is assumed by some R packages. Only the
first is tested by configure
, but both can be checked at run-time
by calling pcre_config()
. JIT support is desirable for the best
for example to specify static linking with a build which has both shared and static libraries.
Such as
GNU tar
1.15 or later, bsdtar
https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/, as used by FreeBSD and OS
X 10.6 and later) or tar
from the Heirloom Toolchest
is normally a shell script.
Some versions (including that from texinfo 5.2 and 6.0) need to be
run under bash
rather than a Bourne shell.
If necessary the path to
can be specified by setting PKGCONF
config.site, on the configure
command line or in the
known as ttf-mscorefonts-installer
in the Debian/Ubuntu world: see
also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_fonts_for_the_Web.
in Debian/Ubuntu.
This is true even for the 'Aqua' version of Tk on OS X, but distributions of that include a copy of the X11 files needed.
Using the Oracle Solaris Studio cc
and 'i686' for earlier versions.
We have measured 15–20% on 'i686' Linux and around 10% on 'x86_64' Linux.
We believe that versions 3.4.0 to 3.10.1 are compatible.
On HP-UX fort77
is the POSIX compliant
FORTRAN compiler, and comes after g77
well as its equivalence to the Rcomplex
structure defined in
for example, X11 font at size 14 could not be
for Intel Core i3/15/17 with gcc >= 4.6.0
This also needs the OpenMP runtime, which is usually distributed separately, e.g. at http://llvm.org/releases.
It will be necessary to install later versions
of software such as libcurl
These days that is
defined by Apple's implementation of clang
, so it is strongly
recommended to use that.
is a tarball which needs to be unpacked in the Terminal by e.g.
sudo tar -zxf gfortran-4.8.2-darwin13.tar.bz2 -C /
. It does not
run on Core 2 Duo Macs.
This also needs the OpenMP runtime, which is distributed separately at that site.
It is reported that for some non-Apple toolchains
needed to contain -D__ACCELERATE__
For more detals see http://www.macstrategy.com/article.php?3.
Java For OS X 2015-001
including gcc
for Sparc
from Oracle.
Windows DLLs need to have all links resolved at build time and so cannot resolve against R.bin.
For example, the
Cygwin version of make 3.81
fails to work correctly.
for R 3.0.0 and later.
such as sort
, find
and perhaps
these flags apply to the compilers: some of the tools use different flags. 32-bit builds are the default.