R Startup Profiles
- 07 February 2012
- computing
- R
It is a useful practice to customize the initialization of R. This is achieved through
RPROFILE
(system wide) and RPROFILE_USER
(user specific) files which are both simple R scripts.
R_PROFILE
is an environment variable, and by default, set to
${R_HOME}/etc/Rprofile.site
. If such a file exists, it is evaluated
in the global environment of your R session.
Per-user customization is achieved through the R_PROFILE_USER
environment variable. After R_PROFILE
has been evaluated, the file
which is pointed by R_PROFILE_USER
is evaluated. If R_PROFILE_USER
is not set, a file named .Rprofile
is searched first in the current
directory, then in the user home directory. If found, it is evaluated
in the global environment of your R session.
R documentation gives quite a good overview of the entire
initialization process of an R session. It is recommended to read this
(through ?.Rprofile
) since it gives some useful hints and warnings
as well.
I am keeping my own .Rprofile
in my home directory. Here is the gist
of it: