Installing and switching between multiple versions of R

When working on R projects, in order to have reproducible code the renv package is useful to create a lock file that lists all the packages, and their versions, that are used in the project. However, renv does not lock the version of R itself. Therefore, if you want to ensure that your code runs with a specific version of R, you may need to install and switch between multiple versions of R on your system.

To do this on linux (ubuntu), I used these three tutorials:

• How to install and switch between multiple R versions on a Mac
• Posit instructions to install an R version
• Posit switching between R versions

Following these instructions on a linux machine will allow you to have multiple R versions in the /opt/R directory.

Then in order to open Rstudio with a certain R version in use. In terminal you need to run:

export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=/opt/R/4.4.2/bin/R

and then in the same terminal session go to your R project file location and open your project file with the following command:

rstudio truncFVAR.Rproj