Download and install RKWard on Windows

Lastest official release

Installing the official release

Installation of RKWard on windows should be straight-forward: Simply download and run the appropriate installer from the link above.

Installing development snapshots

Nightly development snapshots are available from https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/education/rkward/master/ . Note that these are built, automatically, and provided without any human testing. Back up your data, before using these.

Older releases that may still be of interest:

Should you wish to stick with R 4.1.x for now, you will either have to install from source (see below), or use RKWard 0.7.3:

Updating R inside the RKWard installation

Since RKWard 0.7.1, updating R is often possible without any updates to RKWard, especially, for patch level releases of R (e.g. 4.1.3 over 4.1.2).

The recommended way to update R is to

  1. Install R as usual, in its default installation location.
  2. Open the file [Your\RKWard\Installation\]\KDE\bin\rkward.ini, and change the path for “R_executable” to either “auto” or the full path to R.exe.
  3. In case of any problems revert the changes to rkward.ini.

Alternatively, you can install your new version of R to [Your\RKWard\Installation\]KDE\libs\R. The potential advantage is that you will not have to reinstall your R packages after updating R (although it is still recommendable to do so).

Compiling RKWard from source on Windows

  1. Set up “craft” as detailed, here: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source/Windows .
  2. run

craft -i --target=master rkward

(–target=master is optional, and means to build the development version). This should be all you need to fetch rkward and all dependencies (including R). In some cases (when - some - cached packages are not available) this may take several hours to complete.

  1. (optionally): create an installer using:

craft --package rkward

To compile for a particular version of R, use (e.g.):

craft --target=4.1.2 r-base
craft -i rkward

Notes