Packages

This lesson is called Packages, part of the Getting Started With R course. This lesson is called Packages, part of the Getting Started With R course.

Transcript

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Your Turn

Working in the console, install the tidyverse package using the code install.packages("tidyverse")
Install the Positron R Package Manager extension
Check in the Packages tab in the activity bar to confirm that the tidyverse package has been installed successfully

If you are a Windows user and get messages about downloading RTools, you can safely ignore these. You should not need RTools to install packages used in this course.

Learn More

If you want to read about the various packages that make up the Tidyverse, check out its website.

Have any questions? Put them below and we will help you out!

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Bonnie Wagner • March 12, 2026

Hello. I receive the following error on task 1 above. Warning in install.packages("tidyverse") : 'lib = "C:/Program Files/R/R-4.5.3/library"' is not writable

Gracielle Higino Coach • March 12, 2026

Hi Bonnie! Are you using a work computer? This is usually common when you don't have permissions to access certain sections of your machine. One alternative would be to tell R to read packages from another location, one that you know you can record data to. Try updating your .Rprofile file with the following steps:

# Open the .Rprofile in edit mode
file.edit(file.path(Sys.getenv("HOME"), ".Rprofile"))

# Add this to the file:
.libPaths("Absolute/Path/To/Your/Writable/Directory")

# Save and restart R

You can also test running R as an administrator.

Let me know if this works! If it's still buggy, we can schedule a meeting to go through it together.

Bonnie Wagner • March 13, 2026

Hi Gracielle. I am using my personal computer. I tried pasting what you have below in the console, saved and restarted, and I received the following error: Warning in install.packages("tidyverse") : 'lib = "C:/Program Files/R/R-4.5.3/library"' is not writable