Appendix B. Customizing the startup environment

One of the first things that programmers like to do is customize their startup environment to conform to their preferred way of working. Customizing the startup environment allows you to set R options, specify a working directory, load commonly used packages, load user-written functions, set a default CRAN download site, and perform any number of housekeeping tasks.

You can customize the R environment through either a site-initialization file (Rprofile.site) or a directory-initialization file (.Rprofile). These are text files containing R code to be executed at startup.

At startup, R will source the file Rprofile.site from the R_HOME/etc directory, where R_HOME is an environment value. It will ...

Get R in Action, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.