How to upgrade R in linux?

Question

I am new to Linux. I am using Linux mint 18.1. I have installed R using system software manager. My current R version is 3.2. But I want to upgrade it to version 3.4.

How can I do it?

Answer 1

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Note: I now keep on GitHub (here) an up-to-date guide to upgrading R on Linux Mint or Ubuntu Linux, which also includes a bit of extra information about system dependencies for tidyverse, the popular set of data-wrangling packages, as well as devtools, the popular R package development... package.

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The link provided by FedRo is a good resource, however a slight change would need to be made since you're using Linux Mint 18.1 which uses Xenial repositories rather than Trusty repositories (see here). I also typically use the approach here to deal with packages I've already installed when I upgrade R rather than the approach offered by FedRo. So, for completeness, these are all the steps you'd need to take:

Step 1

Go to CRAN's list of mirrors and find the URL of the mirror that is closest to you. The terminal commands below assume you choose http://cran.wustl.edu/

Step 2

Open a terminal and enter the following commands¹ (replacing http://cran.wustl.edu/ with whichever CRAN mirror URL you chose in step 1):

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E298A3A825C0D65DFD57CBB651716619E084DAB9 sudo echo "deb http://cran.wustl.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade r-base r-base-dev sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade 

Note also that I have put to upgrade r-base and r-base-dev, but I don't know if you have r-base-dev installed. If not, I highly recommend you install it via sudo apt install r-base-dev.

Step 3

Start a new R session and run the following:

update.packages(checkBuilt=TRUE, ask=FALSE) 

Then you should be good to go.

Update: Linux Mint 19 and R 3.6.x

Since both Linux Mint and R have seen upgrades since I answered this question, I'm updating for those who come to this answer needing the info for Linux Mint 19 and R 3.6.x.

The only difference is that instead of the command

sudo echo "deb http://cran.wustl.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu xenial/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list 

you need to use

sudo echo "deb http://cran.wustl.edu/bin/linux/ubuntu bionic-cran35/" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list 

(replacing http://cran.wustl.edu/ with whichever CRAN mirror URL you chose in step 1)

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¹ I put here the full key, though many other guides you may see will use only the "short key." I have updated this guide to use the full key out of security concerns (see here, for example).