Using R 4.1.0 and R 4.0.5 on MacOS using RSwitch

Lately R version 4.1.0 was released on CRAN (see https://cran.r-project.org).

The MacOS version was one day late. But yesterday it was released, too. So I wanted to test the new version without being able to go back. “No problem”, I thought “I’m already using RSwitch”. RSwitch is a tiny Mac program which allows you to switch between installed R versions.

But unfornately RSwitch told me that R version 4.0.5 was incomplete after I’ve installed version 4.1.0.

What’s going on?

I took a look at /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions where the different R versions are installed. And indeed in the directory 4.0 most of the files and symbolic where missing.

I installed version 4.0.5 and the same happened to version 4.1.0 – but I could use version 4.0.5 again.

My Solution

So I backed up the directory under /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions using tar (you could also use cp -a etc.), installed version 4.1.0 again and restored my backup.

Now I can use both versions.

User-based Library

But there was still something odd. Using version 4.0.5 I used to install new R-packages in my user-directory beneath ~/Library/R/4.0/library.

So I set up an anlogous directory ~/Library/R/4.1/library and was surprised that .libPaths() doesn’t show me this directory.

So I took a look at the global config-file at /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.1/Resources/etc/Renviron. The environment variable R_LIBS_USER was set to ${R_LIBS_USER-'~/Library/R/x86_64/4.1/library'}. So I removed the /x86_64 part and everythins was fine.

Transerfering Installed Packages

Next I wanted to transfer all my installed packages. So I exported a csv-file with all my installed packages using the old R-version running the following code

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library(tidyverse)

installed.packages() %>% 
  as_tibble() %>%  
  filter(!grepl("^/Library", LibPath)) %>% 
  write_csv2(file = "packages.csv")

So I got a list of my installed packages. Some of these packages were installed only from local repositories so I removed them manually off the list.

The resulting huge list of package names was installed with install.packages().