Painless-R-compilation-and-installation-on-Ubuntu

Compiling R involves installing tons of dependencies, though there are many documents on the internet instructing you how to achieve it, they are kind of outdated. If you are a lazy guy like me and tired of searching for the dependencies of R. This is the right recipe for you. Run the commands at a terminal and you will have all the ingredients ready.

Currently, the code has been tested on

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS R version:4.4 devel (2023-08-08 r84908)
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. R version:4.3 devel (2023-03-22 r84023)
Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS. R version:4.0 devel (2019-12-06 r77536)

If you like it, please contribute to this project by providing your test results.

Download the source code

Find a place you want to put the R source code in. The command below will create a new folder "r-source" under your current folder

sudo apt install subversion
svn checkout https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/ r-source
cd r-source

Install dependencies

Option 1: Using package management(Recommended)

The built-in package management utility is a powerful tool to install all dependencies for R-base. To install them, you need to enable the source packages in your /etc/apt/sources.list. To do that, you can run

sudo perl -p -i -e's/# deb-src/deb-src/' /etc/apt/sources.list

To install the dependencies, run

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt build-dep r-base

Note that this would not install the devtools dependencies. Click here to see how to install them

Option 2: Manually installing the dependencies

Mandatory packages

sudo apt-get install \
build-essential fort77 xorg-dev liblzma-dev libblas-dev gfortran \
gcc-multilib gobjc++ aptitude \
libreadline-dev libbz2-dev libpcre2-dev \
libcurl4 libcurl4-openssl-dev \
default-jre default-jdk openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jre -y

Optional packages

1. Recommended packages: Go to the top-level directory of the R sources, run

./tools/rsync-recommended

2. For building documents:

sudo apt-get install texinfo texlive texlive-fonts-extra -y

R installation

Export JAVA path

R requires a Java path to find the included header. This is my personal setting, I am not sure if it will work for all systems.

## Export a global environment for R to find the Java path
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64

Compiling R

The code below configures R with all debugging information available and without the recommended packages.

./configure CFLAGS='-g -O0' CXXFLAGS='-g -O0' --enable-R-shlib --enable-memory-profiling --without-recommended-packages

Compile and install R. The option '-j' specifies how many cores you want to use during compilation

make  -j8
make check
sudo make install

devtools package dependencies

sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libgit2-dev -y

Keywords for search

These are the error messages you will see if your system does not meet one or more dependence requirement

1. checking whether bzip2 support suffices… configure: error: bzip2 library and headers are required

2. Either pcre >= 8.32 or pcre2 library and headers are required

3. error: --with-readline=yes (default) and headers/libs are not available

4. WARNING: you cannot build PDF versions of the R manuals

5. WARNING: neither inconsolata.sty nor zi4.sty found: PDF vignettes and package manuals will not be rendered optimally