How do you change the default directory in RStudio (or R)?

Question

I consulted http://www.rstudio.com/ide/docs/using/workspaces and tried the setwd code and clicking on More --> Set as working directory options. However, the next time I closed and opened RStudio, it did NOT change my directory to the one I wanted.

How do I set the directory so I don't have change it each time I open RStudio?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but under Tools | Global Options... (alt-TG) there is a way to set the default directory.

Answer 2

On R (3.1.2) for Windows (Win7) I did the following and it worked:

1- Navigate to the file "Rprofile.site" in the R-folder in my case: C:\Program Files\R\etc\Rprofile.site where "etc" is indeed the given name of the sub-folder.

2- Open the file Rprofile.site in a text-editor with administrator privileges (I did in Notepad) and insert right at the top of the file in the first line the following command which tells R to set the working directory at start-up to the PATH you are specifying within the brackets (be sure you use double backslashes "\\" for Windows!), in my case:

setwd("C:\\Users\\FWA\\Documents\\PROGR&MOOCS\\R_coursera")

3- Save the file which then looks like this:

setwd("C:\\Users\\FWA\\Documents\\PROGR&MOOCS\\R_coursera")  # Things you might want to change  # options(papersize="a4") # options(editor="notepad") # options(pager="internal")  # set the default help type # options(help_type="text")   options(help_type="html")  # set a site library # .Library.site <- file.path(chartr("\\", "/", R.home()), "site-library")   # set a CRAN mirror # local({r <- getOption("repos") #       r["CRAN"] <- "http://my.local.cran" #       options(repos=r)})  # Give a fortune cookie, but only to interactive sessions # (This would need the fortunes package to be installed.) #  if (interactive())  #    fortunes::fortune() 

4- Fire up the R-Studio and at the command prompt type the 'get working directory' command like this:

getwd()

5- Your R-Studio should now return the working directory path you previously have specified. In my case R returns this:

[1] "C:/Users/FWA/Documents/PROGR&MOOCS/R_coursera"

6- You're done.

Note: this changes the working directory for your R environment, not only for R-Studio.