FAQ

Why does rig create a user package library?

Installing non-base packages into a user package library has several benefits:

• The system library is not writeable for regular users on some systems (Windows and Linux, typically), so we might as well create a properly versioned user library at the default place.
• Some tools need a clean R environment, with base packages only, and do not work well if user packages are installed into the system library. E.g. R CMD check is such a tool, and https://github.com/r-lib/revdepcheck is another.
• You can delete an R installation (e.g. with rig rm) and then install it again, without losing your R packages.

Why does rig install pak?

To be able to install R packages efficiently, from CRAN, Bioconductor or GitHub, right from the start. pak also supports installing system libraries automatically on some Linux systems.

If you don’t want rig add to install pak, use the --without-pak option.

Why does rig change the permissions of the system library (on macOS)?

In admin mode rig changes the permissions of the system library from the default user-writeable to admin-writeable. This is to make sure that you don’t install packages accidentally into the system library. See “Why does rig create a user package library?” above.

Why does rig set the default CRAN mirror?

To avoid the extra work the users need to spend on this.

The https://cloud.r-project.org mirror is usually better than the others, in that it is a CDN that is close to most users, and that it is updated more often.

If you want to use a different mirror, you can set the repos option in your .Rprofile, so the rig repo settings will be ignored.

You can also use the --without-repos=cran option of rig add.

Why does rig set up P3M?

P3M (Posit Public Package Manager) is generally superior to a regular CRAN mirror on Windows and many Linux systems.

On Linux it includes binary packages for many popular distributions.

On Windows, it includes up to date binary packages for older R versions as well.

To avoid P3M use the --without-repos=p3m option of rig add.

Can rig install R without admin permissions

Yes. rig has a user mode that installs everything into your home directory, so it never needs sudo or administrator rights. In user mode rig installs R into ~/.local/share/rig/r (%APPDATA%\rig\data\r on Windows) and creates startup links and quick links in ~/.local/bin (%USERPROFILE%\.local\bin on Windows), which need to be on your PATH.

rig system user-mode switches to user mode and migrates an existing admin-mode setup (see rig system user-mode --help).

Use rig config set mode=user and rig config set mode=admin to switch between user and admin mode.

Alternatively, switch to user mode temporarily by setting the RIG_MODE=user environment variable, or by passing the --user flag to any rig command.

The default is still admin mode, which installs R system-wide and needs sudo (or an administrator account on Windows). Admin mode is also the older and better tested mode, especially on Linux, where user mode installs portable (manylinux or musl) R builds and uses manylinux R packages, both of which are newer and less widely used than the distro-specific builds and packages of admin mode. If you do have an administrator account, and no reason to keep R in your home directory, stay in admin mode for now.

How is rig different from RSwitch?

While there is a small overlap in functionality, rig and RSwitch are very different. I suggest you look over the features of both to decide which one suits your needs better.

If you run rig in admin mode and also like the extra features of RSwitch, then you can use them together just fine: changing the default R version in RSwitch also changes it in rig and vice versa. You can use the rig cli and the RSwitch app together, or you can also use both menu bar apps at the same time.

However, you can’t use RSwitch with rig if you use rig in user mode, because RSwitch only works with admin mode R installations.

Why does rig install fonts on Linux?

The portable R builds rig installs on Linux bundle the fontconfig library, but not its configuration and not any fonts. On a minimal system — a slim container, Alpine, a bare server — R then has nothing to render text with, and crashes on the first plot.

So after installing a portable build, rig add writes a fonts.conf and downloads a small subset of the DejaVu fonts next to the R installations, and sets FONTCONFIG_FILE in the R installation’s base Rprofile to point at the configuration. Run rig system dirs --fonts to see where they are.

The configuration also lists the standard system font directories (/usr/share/fonts, ~/.local/share/fonts, …), so your own fonts keep working. If you only want the configuration and not the extra fonts, use rig add --without-fonts. If you set FONTCONFIG_FILE yourself, rig’s setting is ignored.

How do I install my own fonts, without administrator rights?

You never need to touch rig’s font configuration for this. On all three platforms there is a per-user font directory that R (and rig’s font configuration on Linux) already looks at, and installing a font is just a matter of copying the font file there. Do not edit the fonts.conf files that rig writes: rig rewrites them on every install, so your changes would be lost.

Linux. Copy the font files into ~/.local/share/fonts (or ~/.fonts):

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/fonts
cp MyFont-*.ttf ~/.local/share/fonts/

The fonts.conf that rig writes for the portable R builds lists both directories, so every R version rig installed picks the new fonts up. You do not need to run fc-cache: fontconfig notices that the font directory is newer than its cache and rescans it at startup. (You can run the host’s fc-cache if it has one, but it might write a cache in a different format version than the fontconfig bundled in the R build, in which case it has no effect.)

Do not put your own fonts into rig’s own font directory (rig system dirs --fonts): rig deletes and re-extracts that directory when it re-downloads the fallback fonts.

macOS. Copy the font files into ~/Library/Fonts, or open them in Font Book and install them “for this user only”:

cp MyFont-*.ttf ~/Library/Fonts/

This works for the quartz devices (which use CoreText, and see ~/Library/Fonts automatically) and for the cairo and X11 devices: the fonts.conf in the R installation lists ~/Library/Fonts, ~/.local/share/fonts and ~/.fonts. If a new font does not show up in a cairo device, refresh the fontconfig cache with the fc-cache in the R installation, which knows where R’s configuration is:

"$(R RHOME)/bin/fc-cache" -f

Windows. R uses the system font list on Windows, not fontconfig, and rig does not configure fonts at all there. To install a font for yourself only, right-click the font file in Explorer and choose Install for current user (or open it and click Install — Windows installs it into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts for your user, without administrator rights).

Then map it to an R font family before using it in the windows() device, using the font’s real family name:

windowsFonts(myfont = windowsFont("My Font"))
plot(1, family = "myfont")

The ragg and systemfonts packages find per-user fonts without this extra step on all three platforms; use systemfonts::system_fonts() to check that a font was installed correctly.

Which domains does rig download files from?

Here is the list of domains that you need to enable in your proxy. Note that some of these, in particular the GitHub ones, might trigger redirects.

• https://api.r-hub.io/rversions for resolving R versions, i.e. this is needed for rig install, rig available, etc.
• rig install downloads pak from https://r-lib.github.io/p/pak unless requested otherwise.
• rig install sets https://cloud.r-project.org as the default CRAN mirror, unless requested otherwise.
• rig install sets https://packagemanager.posit.co as the Posit Package Manager CRAN mirror on supported Linux systems, unless requested otherwise.
• rig install downloads the EPEL package from https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel on RHEL systems.
• rig rtools downloads Rtools from the following URLs on Windows:
  • https://github.com/r-hub/rtools44/releases,
  • https://github.com/r-hub/rtools43/releases,
  • https://github.com/r-hub/rtools42/releases,
  • https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools
• https://github.com/R-macos/gcc-darwin-arm64/releases, https://github.com/fxcoudert/gfortran-for-macOS/releases and whatever domains Homebrew is using, to download system packages for rig sysreqs on macOS.
• rig add downloads https://curl.se/ca/cacert.pem (the CA bundle) and the fallback fonts from https://github.com/r-lib/rig/releases for the portable Linux R builds.

Feedback

Please open an issue in our issue tracker at https://github.com/r-lib/rig/issues