Choose R version for one specific project

[lalelu]

For a project, I have to use an R package that requires an older version of R (<= 3.3.1).

I see from the global options that I can choose any version of R to use in R Studio. However, I'd like to use the most recent version of R for all my other projects.

Question: Is it possible to choose a particular (older) version of R for just one specific project?

Thanks for your help!

[authorprof]

It does not work that way in R. i believe you need to set up a separatee install of Rstudio with the old R in a separate project.

You can however choose a version of R in R studio in options and run your project, but if you need to run multiple projects with others in new versions it will confuse R and things will get wobbly in more than one project.

Safer to just run it together and probably I would choose a separate installation in a different partition, whatever it takes

Note: I am just a regular R user, and I do not develop for R.

[jcblum]

Are you using RStudio Desktop, or RStudio Server? Project-specific R versions are a feature of RStudio Server Pro (see: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/212364537-Using-multiple-versions-of-R-with-RStudio-Server-Pro).

As far as I know, RStudio Desktop can only use one version of R at a time. How this works is dependent to some extent on your operating system. See: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200486138-Changing-R-versions-for-RStudio-desktop

Another option might be setting up a Docker/rocker container for that project. There’s some useful discussion of Docker and R here:

Containers and R

There is a lot going on with R and Docker. It seems to me that it is widely used especially in a development workflow for testing. It is also used for reproductible reseach, for in R in production... Here are some useful ressources that could help : A blog post on R developpement with docker for testing http://www.jimhester.com/2017/10/13/docker/ Another blog post on beggining with travis that use docker in the background https://juliasilge.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-travis/ The most important to know is the rocker project where you'll find some containers with R in different configuration https://github.com/rocker-org https://hub.docker.com/u/rocker/ http://dirk.eddelbuettel…

Resources for new R admins

docker has a lot of semantics that make it much more lightweight than a virtual machine. This makes it very nice for the type of throw-away exploration that @snkfischer is talking about (or microservices, etc.). It also does not have its own kernel (it uses the host machine's kernel), which makes images much less resource-intensive, starts up quicker, etc. On a typical workstation, a few VMs will cripple the host machine's resources because you are running several operating systems concurrently (and lots of overhead with it). With Docker, it's way easier to run a whole bunch of containers concurrently without resource issues, and it pretends to have a separate operating system, so you st…

[lalelu]

Thanks a lot for this great list of resources! I'm on RStudio Desktop, so will have a look at the Docker option!