Automatic updates for R on Windows with WSL

The usual way of updating R on Windows is to trigger updates manually with the R package ìnstallr. However, a more convenient way to update R is to install R inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and leveraging the Windows Update process to update both the WSL distribution and your R installation automatically.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

WSL2 requires Windows 10 version 2004 and higher (Build 19041 and higher) or Windows 11, detailed installation instructions can be found in the Microsoft documentation. If you do not have a WSL installation yet, you can install Debian as WSL distribution by entering the following command in a cmd or Powershell terminal as administrator:

wsl --install -d Debian

When installing WSL without the -d option, Ubuntu will be installed as default Linux distribution. Instructions for installing R are very similar on Ubuntu and can be found on https://www.r-project.org/ as well.

After restarting you can log in to your WSL distribution by simply typing wsl ~.

R Installation

While R is available in the Debian package repositories, the most reliable way to ensure to always have the latest R version installed is to configure the Debian repository maintained by the R project.

Configuring the R project Debian repository

Create a new entry for the additional repository:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/r-project.list

Add an entry for the repository like this, you can find the correct branch for your Debian version here:

deb http://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/debian bookworm-cran40/

The second step is to add the key for verifying the package integrity, details can again be found on r-project.org:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com \
    --recv-key '95C0FAF38DB3CCAD0C080A7BDC78B2DDEABC47B7'
gpg --armor --export '95C0FAF38DB3CCAD0C080A7BDC78B2DDEABC47B7' | \
    sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_debian_key.asc

Installing R

Since you have just added a new repository, run the following commands to retrieve information about newly available packages and install any applicable updates:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Finally, install R with the following command. The second package r-base-dev is an optional dependency needed for the development of R packages and can be omitted.

sudo apt install r-base r-base-dev

RStudio Desktop

Since WSL2 you can run Linux GUI apps in WSL. RStudio Desktop is the most widely used graphical IDE for working with R and can be installed manually with the provided binary packages on posit.co. Unfortunately RStudio is not available in the official Debian repositories.

wget https://download1.rstudio.org/electron/jammy/amd64/rstudio-2023.12.1-402-amd64.deb -P /tmp
sudo apt install gdebi-core
sudo gdebi /tmp/rstudio-2023.12.1-402-amd64.deb

When you try to start RStudio with the command rstudio you will find that it complains that it is missing a dependency which needs to be installed manually:

sudo apt install libasound2

Once installed you can also find an entry for RStudio in the Windows Start menu.

Notes

• You can open the Windows File Explorer at the current location in WSL with explorer.exe .
• Note that transfering large files between WSL2 and Windows is rather slow
• Instructions for installing RStudio Server in WSL can be found on posit.co
• Some R packages like tidyverse require additional system dependencies, look at the the output when running ìnstall.packages and install them as needed