Installing Rtools
Jeffrey Leek, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
What is Rtools?
- A collection of tools necessary for building R packages in Windows
- Available for download athttp://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/
Download Rtools
- Select the .exe download link from the table that corresponds to your version of R
- Note: If you're not sure what version of R you have, open or restart R and it's the first thing that comes up in the console
- If you have the most recent version of R, you should select the most recent Rtools download (at the top of the chart)
- Once the download completes, open the .exe file to begin the installation
Install Rtools
- Unless you really know what you are doing, you should just go with the default selections at each step of the installation
- There are only two exceptions worth noting:
- If you already have Cygwin installed on your machine, you should follow the instructions given during installation (and linked to here:http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/Rtools.txt)
- IMPORTANT: You should make sure that the box is checked to have the installer edit your PATH (see below).
Install devtools
- Once the Rtools installation completes, open RStudio
- Install the devtools R package if you have not previously done so
- If you aren't sure, enter
find.package("devtools")in the console
- If you aren't sure, enter
- To install devtools, use
install.packages("devtools")
Verify Rtools installation
- After devtools is done installing, load it using
library(devtools) - Then type
find_rtools()as shown below - This should return
TRUEin the console if your Rtools installation worked properly
