How to Install R on Debian 9

R is a open source programming language and free software environment for statistical computing with graphical interface.R languages widely used for statistical computing and data mining for developing statistical software and performing data analysis. In this tutorial described how to install R on Debian 9 system.

Prerequisites#

Make sure you are logged in with non-root user account with sudo privileges.

Installing R on Debian#

R is a fast-moving project, the latest stable version isn’t always available from Debian’s repositories, so we’ll need to add the external repository maintained by CRAN.

At first, you should install required dependencies to add new repository. Run below command to install dependencies:

sudo apt install dirmngr apt-transport-https ca-certificates software-properties-common gnupg2

Now need to enable CRAN repository and add the CRAN GPG key to your system by issue below command:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-key 'E19F5F87128899B192B1A2C2AD5F960A256A04AF'

sudo add-apt-repository 'deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian stretch-cran35/'

Once the repository added you should update package list by typing:

sudo apt update

Next issue below command to install R on Debian:

sudo apt install r-base

You can verify the installation by running the following command which will print the R version:

R --version

Output
R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26) -- "Planting of a Tree"
Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Install R Packages from CRAN#

R is so popular because of wide availability of packages through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). You should install build-essential package which contains the tools required for compiling R Packages.

sudo apt install build-essential

We are going to install a stringr package for an example, which provides fast, correct implementations of common string manipulations.

Start by opening the R console as root:

sudo -i R

It will show as below:

R version 3.6.0 (2019-04-26) -- "Planting of a Tree"
Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)

R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions.
Type 'license()' or 'licence()' for distribution details.

Natural language support but running in an English locale

R is a collaborative project with many contributors.
Type 'contributors()' for more information and
'citation()' on how to cite R or R packages in publications.

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

>

To install stringr package just type:

install.packages("stringr")

Installation will take some time and after completion load library using:

library(stringr)

Let’s create a simple vector named demo:

demo <- c("How", "to", "Install", "R", "on", "Debian", "9")

Now run the below command to print the length of a string:

str_length(demo)

[1] 3 2 7 1 2 6 1

If you want to install more packages you can find it at CRAN Packages.

Conclusion#

You have successfully learned how to install R on Debian 9 system. If you have any problem or suggestion please leave a comment below.