Installing R in Conda Env and easy use with VScode

There is already a useful Webpage describing general steps. However, I would prefer to summarize it below with an easy way to use in VScode.

Setting up a Conda Environment with R

Can either install R by creating a new conda environment

conda create -n ENVNAME -c conda-forge r-base=R-VERSION

or install R directly within an activated conda environment

conda install -c conda-forge r-base=R-VERSION

Installing Essential Packages for VScode-R

The R Essentials bundle contains approximately 200 of the most popular R packages for data science, including the IRKernel, dplyr, shiny, ggplot2, tidyr, caret, and nnet. It is good enough to install this package for using R with conda env. Apart from that, httpgd, languageserver and radian are also three useful packages for VScode-R as stated in the R extension info. To quickly install them together with R Essentials, I uploaded a package bundle r-4vscode for easy installation:

conda install -c demiwlw r-4vscode

Now you can simply execute radian (or r if you add an alias for radian) in the terminal to open the R console in the activated conda environment!

TIPS

1. To set an alias for radian, execute (for MacOS)
   echo 'alias r="radian"' >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc
2. To create a simple custom bundle metapackage that contains several popular programs and their dependencies:
   conda metapackage custom-bundle 0.1.0 --dependencies PACKAGES --summary "My custom bundle"
   Then we can share the new metapackage by uploading it to the channel on anaconda.org.