RStudio is offered to the campus at https://rstudio.colby.edu/ for light coursework and research use. Simply login with your Colby account and you will have access to an environment for creating and executing R programs. The landing page will look like this:
Home Directory and Filer Personal / Course Shares
The default 'home' directory is only available through the RStudio system, but does provide a path to your personal directory on Filer. If you create files within RStudio that you need to access outside the system, for example to email them to someone or submit them for an assignment, simply copy/move them into your Filer personal directory to access them outside the system. You can also use 'export' to download the file directly.
R Package Installation, Enabling, and Removal
The system allows users to maintain their own R environments via installing, enabling, updating, and removing packages within their User Library. Simply switch to the 'Packages' tab, click Install, and the popup will autofill with any available packages that match. You have the ability to update and remove them as well.
If there are errors during a package installation, don't hesitate to email support@colby.edu or click the 'Issues with RStudio' button in the upper right side of this page to get assistance, as some package dependencies must be maintained by our System Administrator.
General Recommendations
As this is a shared general-use system, we recommend using it for relatively small and short-term workloads associated with small experiments and basic coursework. If you are running a multithreaded or time-intensive workload, or find this system to be resource constraining in other ways, reach out to support about assistance gaining access to our High Performance Computing system that is better suited for that more significant work.