Motivation

As an R developer, I frequently set up new development and testing environments for my R packages on Windows. This process often involves installing several command-line tools alongside R, including but not limited to:

• Rtools: Compiles C/C++/Fortran code.
• TinyTeX: Compiles reference manual and PDF vignettes.
• Pandoc: Renders R Markdown (v2) vignettes.
• Quarto: Renders Quarto vignettes.

With the growing list of command-line tools, locating their installed directories and making them accessible via the command line has become increasingly time-consuming. I feel something can be done to make it better.

Documenting the paths

The first step in making the environment setup process more productive and standardized is to document the canonical installation paths. This information needs to be more centrally and formally documented online. To address this, I created a GitHub repository listing the important paths: https://github.com/nanxstats/r-windows-paths.

Additionally, modifying the PATH environment variable on Windows via the GUI is less straightforward than editing plaintext configuration files on Linux or macOS. Therefore, I wrote a brief guide for configuring the PATH environment variable with screenshots in path.md.

Automatic version updates

Some software paths depend on software versions, such as R, Rtools, and RStudio IDE. I implemented a simple scraping mechanism to fetch the latest release versions from reliable sources, even though they don’t provide official APIs. This automation allows the repository to stay updated easily without manual checks. See the R code chunk in README.Rmd for the implementation.

Am I missing something?

If you know of any important Windows command-line tools that integrate with R and are not included, please submit a pull request to help expand the list.