Installing R locally

Install the R runtime

Visit the CRAN homepage. There you will find download links for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Download and run the installer for your operating system.

Install the RStudio IDE (Recommended)

RStudio is a popular cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) for programming in R (and also supports other languages like Python, JavaScript, and Markdown). Using RStudio will make writing your code solutions and running tests easier.

Download and install the current stable version of RStudio. Or, alternatively, get the preview version of an upcoming release.

Install the Visual Studio Code extension for R (Alternative)

The R extension for Visual Studio Code supports extended syntax highlighting, code completion, linting, formatting, interacting with R terminals, viewing data, plots, workspace variables, help pages, managing packages and working with R Markdown documents.

Download and install the current version of R extension

Install the R packages for running tests

The test runner for the specs is the testthat library from Hadley Wickham, which is a popular choice for R package authors.

To install this library, type the following in your RStudio console (or wherever you are using R).

install.packages("testthat")

While it is unlikely that you will need to install packages to solve the exercism problems, you may want to bring in a general-purpose utility package like tidyverse that suit your programming style. To install and load a package like tidyverse:

install.packages("tidyverse")
library(tidyverse)