asdf-r

March 12, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

R plugin for asdf version manager | plugins repository

Dependencies

MacOS

  1. Homebrew: used to install the remainder of the dependencies
  2. brew install gcc xz libxt cairo pcre2

More details on environment variables setup for Mac OS builds can be found here.

Linux

Ubuntu / Debian

  1. sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl3-dev libreadline-dev gfortran
  2. sudo apt-get install liblzma-dev liblzma5 libbz2-1.0 libbz2-dev
  3. sudo apt-get install xorg-dev libbz2-dev liblzma-dev libpcre2-dev

Install

asdf plugin add r https://github.com/asdf-community/asdf-r.git

ASDF options

Check asdf readme for instructions on how to install & manage versions of R.

When installing R using asdf install, you can pass custom configure options with the following env vars:

  • R_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS - use only your configure options
  • R_EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS - append these configure options along with ones that this plugin already uses

Building R Shared Library

RStudio (and some other libs) requires building R shared library. In order to do that pass an extra configure option to asdf install:

R_EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS=--enable-R-shlib asdf install r <version>

maybe you'll need Cairo as well:

R_EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS='--enable-R-shlib --with-cairo' asdf install r <version>

Troubleshooting

X11 / XQuartz errors

If you encounter X11-related errors during installation and don't need X11 support, you can skip it:

R_EXTRA_CONFIGURE_OPTIONS='--with-x=no' asdf install r <version>

If you do need X11 support, install XQuartz first manually or by running:

brew install xquartz

Missing library errors (liblzma, pcre2, etc.)

If installation fails with errors about missing libraries like liblzma or pcre2, set the compiler flags to point to the Homebrew installation paths:

export CPPFLAGS="-I$(brew --prefix xz)/include -I$(brew --prefix pcre2)/include"
# or if that doesn't work
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/lib"

asdf install r <version>

This tells the compiler where to find the required header files for these libraries.