Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

RStudio does not detect R

I recently had a user contact me to have R and RStudio installed. I downloaded and installed them both, and thought that would be the end of it. As it turned out, it wasn’t. When she went to run RStudio, this message popped up:

Choose R Installation

Neither default versions worked, and when we browsed to where they were installed, no executable could be found (though we saw it just fine when browsing the folder). I noticed, however, that R had not been installed to C:\Program Files\, but rather to the user’s Documents folder. I ran the installation once more, this time as administrator, making sure that R was installed to C:\Program Files\. Lo and behold; when we next ran RStudio, it started up, no mention of any problems.

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Aleksander Nordgarden-Rødner

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4 responses to “RStudio does not detect R”

  1. Jonathan

    RStudio reads some registry keys on Windows to figure out where R lives. They’re documented here:

    https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200486138-Using-Different-Versions-of-R

    If you need to use a custom installation of R on Windows, you can create the registry keys by hand in lieu of reinstalling to a known location.

    Reply
    1. razumny

      That is very helpful information, thank you Jonathan!

      Reply
    2. Anthony

      Could you please provide some info on creating those custom keys? That would be very helpful 🙂

      Reply
      1. razumny

        It’s covered in a post linked to in Jonathan’s link. Here’s the direct link:

        http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/rw-FAQ.html#Does-R-use-the-Registry_003f

        Reply

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