How to install Tidyverse on Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.04

Question

I\'m running Ubuntu 16.04 [now 17.04: see note in bold below] and R 3.4.1. I installed the latter this morning, so I presume it\'s the latest version. I want to install Tidy

Answer 1

I believe had a similar problem trying to install the tidyverse package. Being reasonably new to Linux and a complete rookie to R, I followed the Ubuntu installation intructions on the CRAN Project's homepage. When I installed R, I deliberately skipped installation of the r-base-dev package, as it said it was intended for "package maintainers". I didn't really read the latter part or understand the necessity for compiling packages myself.

Anyway, installing r-base-dev package, and allowed me to install the Tidyverse package without problems. The complete steps to get it to work should be something like below. In terminal do the following steps (Step 1-3 may or may not be necessary, but I've added them just in case):

1. Add deb https:///bin/linux/ubuntu artful/ in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, replacing by the actual URL of your favorite CRAN mirror. See https://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html for the list of CRAN mirrors.

2. Add the repository key to your system:

   sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E084DAB9
   

   An alternate method can be used by retrieving the key with

   gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-key E084DAB9
   

   and then feed it to apt-key with

   gpg -a --export E084DAB9 | sudo apt-key add -
   

3. To install the complete R system, use

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install r-base
   

4. Then comes the step I missed, that proved crucial to be able to compile the packages within the Tidyverse package, namely installing the r-base-dev package:

   sudo apt-get install r-base-dev
   

5. Then in RStudio execute the package installation command:

   install.packages(tidyverse)
   

Hopefully this will work for you as well. Read the installation guide on the CRAN Projects homepages for further about the installation procedure.