How To Install R on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install R on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, R is a popular open-source programming language, often used for graphical and statistical computing. It is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing and is mainly used by statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and performing data analysis.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of R on a CentOS 8 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install R on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled PowerTools
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing R on CentOS 8.

Now we can install R using the following command:

sudo dnf install R

Verify the installation, and run the following command which will print the R version:

$ R --version

R version 3.6.3 (2020-03-14) -- "Dark and Stormy Night"
Copyright (C) 2019 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)

Step 3. Installing R packages from CRAN.

First, start by opening the R console as root:

sudo -i R

Example install the stringr package:

install.packages("stringr")

The installation will take some time and once completed, load the library by typing:

library(stringr)

You can find more R packages on the CRAN Packages page, and install them with install.packages().

Congratulations! You have successfully installed R. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing R open-source programming language in CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official R website.