Installing RStudio daily builds

As a member of the team at RStudio, I install the daily build of our open source RStudio IDE almost every morning.

There are published ways to download and install these builds for Linux but that doesn’t work for me.

My main development machine is a Macbook Pro, and, well, we’re different.

After far too many iterations of “google for ‘rstudio daily mac’ then download the DMG then mount it then copy the application to /Applications”, I put on my “Let’s write a script for that!” hat and … wrote a script.

You can find the latest version as a GitHub Gist and embedded below (the embed will not appear in RSS or in non-Javascript viewers). It fetches the latest daily RStudio IDE build from our download site, replacing any existing install.

To use this script, download it to your own machine, make it executable, and run it. Use it every day!

# Mark executable after downloading.
$ chmod +x install-rstudio-daily.sh
# Every day!
$ ./install-rstudio-daily.sh
Discovering daily build from: http://www.rstudio.org/download/latest/daily/desktop/mac/RStudio-latest.dmg
Downloading daily build from: http://s3.amazonaws.com/rstudio-dailybuilds/RStudio-0.99.585.dmg
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 57.5M  100 57.5M    0     0  5558k      0  0:00:10  0:00:10 --:--:-- 6493k
Installed RStudio-0.99.585 to /Applications

Update 2015-06-10 The script has been simplified based on an RStudio support article. The sample output and the Gist have been updated with these changes.

Update 2016-10-12 The script now supports both OSX/macOS and Ubuntu Linux.