Motivation

On a previous post I explained how to install R and Python effortlessy.

Now I bought a Windows machine and this post concentrates a lot of reading and the experiments I made until I configures everything in order to write this blog post. I use Pelican for my blog, so I had to do a few steps I wasn’t aware of in Windows.

What do you need to do this?

You’ll need Chocolatey installed and administrator access to Windows PowerShell. In this way an important part of path-related issues are solved.

Install R, Python and LaTeX

This part is easy. From PowerShell run:

choco install r.project python2

Install RStudio and GitHub Desktop

I just downloaded the graphic installers and this part this not need additional configurations.

Install Rtools

If you want to build a package, RStudio will warn you that it cannot find Rtools and will ask you to download it. This part is all about clicking “yes” and RStudio will set up everything.

Install Pelican, Markdown and rpy2

MathJax plugin presents problems with newer Pelican versions, so I’ll use Pelican 3.6.3 as in my post for OS X.

Run this from PowerShell:

pip install pelican==3.6.3 markdown

Before installing rpy2 you need to edit the system PATH. Go to the Control Panel and add this to the Path:

%ProgramFiles%\R\R-3.4.1\bin\x64

Then create the following variables:

R_HOME pointing to %ProgramFiles%\R\R-3.4.1
R_LIBS_USER pointing to %userprofile%\documents\R\win-library\3.4
R_USER containing your username

The easiest option to install rpy2 is to install it using UC Irvine‘s I got the version for Python 2.7 and then I did run:

pip install C:\Users\pacha\Downloads\rpy2-2.7.8-cp27-none-win_amd64.whl

Install R packages

If all of the above steps went well, you can open RStudio and run this:

# common use packages
install.packages(c("tidyverse","data.table","dtplyr","knitr","devtools"))

# things I use for lectures/work
library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("ropenscilabs/skimr")
install.packages(c("sjlabelled","np","bbmle","micEcon","HistData","XLConnect"))

And finally I was able to write blog entries without errors or warning on Windows!