How to get RStudio IDE to use the correct terminal path in Mac OS X?

[caewok]

I am using a MacBook Pro with Apple silicon. To take advantage of the programs that can use this natively, homebrew creates a new directory (/opt/homebrew) that is functionally the same as /usr/local except that it holds the packages that are native to R rewritten for Apple silicon.

Thus, in Terminal in Mac OS X, echo $PATH correctly returns

/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

And I am able to use installed homebrew commands from the Terminal in Mac OS X.

But in RStudio IDE, system("echo $PATH") returns

usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS

Note the missing "/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin".

The same issue occurs if I open a new terminal window in RStudio IDE (Note: different than Terminal in Mac OS X) and type echo $PATH (the homebrew directories are missing.)

How do I permanently modify the PATH that RStudio uses to add "/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin"?

Thank you!

(Please don't refer me to random StackOverflow articles—I have been through them and none of those options work. The RStudio application apparently does not look to the .bash_profile or the .zshrc profile when setting PATH. I even tried editing the Info.plist in RStudio.app directory to set the PATH there, but that did not work either.)

[tjstarak]

I'm having exactly same issue, went through the entire internet, no solutions so far. It's quite inconvenient since R packages need to be compiled on M1 - but this will throw an error if a package requires other tools installed via homebrew (e.g. cmake or libpng). So far I've resorted to launching rstudio from terminal ("open -na rstudio") which makes it inherit $PATH from zsh.

[jrmuirhead]

I've found that the advice about 1/3 of the way down on Transitioning from x86 to arm64 on macOS - experiences of an R user worked for me.

In short:

1. In R, install package startup
2. In a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.Renviron.d/sysname=Darwin,machine=arm64
cd ~/.Renviron.d/sysname=Darwin,machine=arm64
echo 'PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:${PATH}"' > path

3. Add

startup::startup()

to the file ~/.Rprofile

The result in Rstudio:

system("echo $PATH")
/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Applications/Little Snitch.app/Contents/Components:/opt/X11/bin:/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/postback

[tjstarak]

Great resource, thanks for sharing! Wish I'd stumbled on that article much earlier, would've saved me plenty of suffering when configuring gfortran.

I managed to solve the issue a bit differently, admittedly covered in Homebrew FAQ, by running:

 sudo launchctl config user path "${PATH}"

After rebooting, RStudio now uses same $PATH as my zsh. As a side note, turns out I didn't need to compile most of the packages, most of my issues stemmed from the fact that I used Homebrew-compiled version (brew install r) which is incompatible with CRAN binaries..

After reinstalling R with brew install --cask r I can use binaries.

[MikeBess]

Seems related to RStudio uses different path to application (e.g., `rsync`, `ffmpeg`, ...) · Issue #10551 · rstudio/rstudio · GitHub which we're looking at improving for next release (Spotted Wakerobin)

[jacquelinegutman]

Apologies for this, this does appear to be a bug on RStudio Desktop for Mac, and we are actively working on a fix but do not have resolution yet. I suggest to follow the linked Github issue above, and keep an eye out for subsequent RStudio releases for a long-term fix. However, in the meantime, a temporary workaround is to create or modify the ~/.Renviron file, setting PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/Applications/Little Snitch.app/Contents/Components:/opt/X11/bin:/Applications/RStudio.app/Contents/MacOS/postback" or whatever the desired value of your PATH variable should be. The PATH should show correctly if you run R directly from your Terminal, and so you can run Sys.getenv("PATH") in R directly (not RStudio) to get the desired value of the PATH to paste into your ~/.Renviron file. We are working to resolve this issue.

[jacquelinegutman]

Another temporary workaround that should work in the meantime -- if you double click the RStudio app icon to open the application, it will load with the incorrect PATH variable. If however, you launch RStudio from your Terminal (open /Applications/RStudio.app) the PATH variable should be correct when running Sys.getenv("PATH") in your RStudio console. Again, you can save that PATH to your ~/.Renviron file if you don't want to have to remember to launch from the terminal each time. We hope this workaround helps until a fix is released.