Updating R

Its been a while since we talked about R. There is one important point that I wanted to raise since this is a security blog. That is that R and its packages must be updated just like any other package on your Linux system.

How To Update
The R packages use things like curl to pull remote content and thus need maintaining as curl is updated to fix its own CVE's. Some of the R packages are very complex and have several layers of dependencies and pull a lot of source code to recompile. I'll show you the easy way to fix all this.

First, start up Rstudio. Then find the menu item "Tools" and click on it. You will see a menu item that says "Check for package updates".

Click on it and it will "think" for a couple seconds while its fetching update information and comparing with your local repository. When its done, the dialog box will look something like this.

Then you click on "Select All" and then "Install updates" and it will start downloading source. It will recompile the R packages and install them to the runtime R repository off of your home directory. When it finishes, you are done. You can restart Rstudio to reload the packages with new ones and go back to doing data science things.

Conclusion
Its really simple to keep R updated. It has vulnerable packages just like anything else on your system. Occasionally there are feature enhancements. The hardest part is just developing the habit to update R periodically.