Installing Rtools

Jeffrey Leek, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

What is Rtools?

Select the .exe download link from the table that corresponds to your version of R
- Note: If you're not sure what version of R you have, open or restart R and it's the first thing that comes up in the console
If you have the most recent version of R, you should select the most recent Rtools download (at the top of the chart)
Once the download completes, open the .exe file to begin the installation

Unless you really know what you are doing, you should just go with the default selections at each step of the installation
There are only two exceptions worth noting:
- If you already have Cygwin installed on your machine, you should follow the instructions given during installation (and linked to here: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/Rtools/Rtools.txt)
- IMPORTANT: You should make sure that the box is checked to have the installer edit your PATH (see below).

Once the Rtools installation completes, open RStudio
Install the devtools R package if you have not previously done so
- If you aren't sure, enter find.package("devtools") in the console
To install devtools, use install.packages("devtools")

After devtools is done installing, load it using library(devtools)
Then type find_rtools() as shown below
This should return TRUE in the console if your Rtools installation worked properly