Ubuntu Packages For R - Brief Instructions

Install R

Package for the current R 4.4. release* are available for most stable Desktop releases of Ubuntu until their official end of life date. However, only the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release is fully supported. As of May 1, 2024 the supported releases are

  • Noble Numbat (24.04, amd64 only),
  • Jammy Jellyfish (22.04, amd64 only),
  • Focal Fossa (20.04; LTS and amd64 only),
  • Bionic Beaver (18.04; LTS), and
  • Xenial Xerus (16.04; LTS).

Run these lines (if root, remove sudo) to tell Ubuntu about the R binaries at CRAN.

# update indices
sudo apt update -qq
# install two helper packages we need
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common dirmngr
# add the signing key (by Michael Rutter) for these repos
# To verify key, run gpg --show-keys /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc 
# Fingerprint: E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9
wget -qO- https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/marutter_pubkey.asc | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc
# add the R 4.0 repo from CRAN -- adjust 'focal' to 'groovy' or 'bionic' as needed
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-cran40/"

Here we use lsb_release -cs to access which Ubuntu flavor you run: one of “jammy”, impish”, “focal”, “bionic”, …

Then run

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends r-base

to to install R and its dependencies.

For more detailed instructions, including details on administration and maintenance of R Packages, see the full README.

For older R releases, see the corresponding README.

Get 5000+ CRAN Packages

For almost all packages in CRAN and BioConductor, please utilize the r2u project. Details on how to setup and install packages can be found at the project website.

The c2d4u project is currently on hiatus and no longer updating packages. Please use r2u for current updates.

Acknowledgements

The Debian R packages are maintained by Dirk Eddelbuettel. The Ubuntu packages are compiled for i386 and amd64 by Michael Rutter () using scripts developed by Vincent Goulet.