R: RGraphviz installation

Question

I've been trying to install the library using brute force - trying different combinations of the things people have posted in mailing lists (I'm too lazy to list them out one by one, but I think I tried the most of them. I can list that too if it helps anyone.). The results have varied from a harmless message of a missing dll to RGui not being able to start before I remove the library manually. Nevertheless, I haven't succeeded...

Do you know how to install it properly, so that it works? I'm running 64bit Windows 7 and I'm not keen of compiling packages from source. Thanks!

Answer 1

Install Rgraphviz 2.2.1 from Bioconductor

According to the latest README:

Rgraphviz now comes bundles with Graphviz. This should greatly simplify installation on all platforms, compared with earlier versions.

Bioconductor 2.11 contains a lot of libraries that you might not want or need, but it does seem to be the easiest path to achieving what you want. These are the instructions on the Rgraphviz homepage:

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("Rgraphviz")

These instructions work for R x64 2.15.2 on Windows 7

library("Rgraphviz")

Loading required package: graph
Loading required package: grid

set.seed(123)
V <- letters[1:10]
M <- 1:4
g1 <- randomGraph(V, M, 0.2)
plot(g1)

Answer 2

The README inside the source package for RGraphviz contains very some pretty clear instructions.

I think it's a bit user-unfriendly to those who only want to install the binary package, to hint that they might also want to download and unpack a tar.gz file containing the complete source, in order to find some technical info .... which turns out to be absolutely crucial.

Answer 3

One word of warning. If you follow the installation instructions for Rgrahpviz precisely, things won't work. Installing the package graphviz edits the environment PATH, but incorrectly. I didn't notice and I bet lots of others missed it too.

Rgraphviz wants to look for the binary in ...;C:\Graphviz2.20\bin\; BUT the graphviz install adds a path only as far as ;C:\Graphviz2.20\;.

You'll have to edit it. Older instructions suggest a manual edit anyway, but newer ones leave it to graphviz.