How to Set Up R Portable

The R portable means we can use the R language anywhere we want so that we don’t have to install it repeatedly on different machines. This tutorial demonstrates how to set up R portable.

Set-Up R Portable

Installing R as a portable becomes handy for usage, we can use it anywhere, and we don’t have to install it repeatedly. The R Portable files are available on SourceForge.

Before starting the setup, we should keep in mind that the R file system scheme is Unix-based, so to use it in Windows, we use \, and for systems like Mac/Unix, we use /. ~ can be used for the home directory.

Follow the steps below to set up the R portable.

1. Portable systems work on portable or cloud drives, so either we can use DropBox/OneDrive or any USB drive. We need to create a directory R Portable, so the path to our drive will be ~\D:\R Portable.

2. The next step is to download the R portable. The R portable can be found here; download it to the portable device in the R Portable folder.

3. Once the R portable is downloaded, install it to the R Portable directory.

   

4. Once the installation is completed, the next step is downloading and installing R-Studio Portable.

5. The zip version of R-Studio is required, which can be downloaded here.

   

6. Extract the R-Studio zip file to the R Portable directory.

7. Once the file is completely extracted, go to the R Studio directory and double-click the rstudio.exe to open it; you can find it in the bin directory of R-Studio.

8. The first time we start the R-Studio, it will ask for the current R version for the R-Studio. Go to the ~/R Portable/R-Portable/App/R-Portable and select the folder.

   Make sure to select the appropriate version.

9. Once the version is selected in R-Studio, it is ready to work.

10. Set the working directory in the R Portable directory by the following method.

    setwd("D:\R Portable\Portable Work Directory")
    

11. Make sure you use \ for Windows in the path and / for Unix/macOS.

12. To keep all the libraries installed in the R Portable version, create a path for libraries in the R-Portable version and set the libraries’ path to that directory. Use the following method.

    .libPaths("D:\R Portable\Portable Libraries")
    

13. The above method will create a new path for libraries, and all the libraries for the portable versions will be saved.

14. The R-Portable and R-Studio Portable are ready to work now.

Following the above steps can create a portable version of R and R-Studio. If you don’t want to use the USB drive, you can also use DropBox or OneDrive.