Radiant – Business analytics using R and Shiny

Radiant is a platform-independent browser-based interface for business analytics in R, based on the Shiny package. Developed by Vincent Nijs. Please use the issue tracker on GitHub to suggest enhancements or report problems: https://github.com/radiant-rstats/radiant/issues. For other questions and comments please use radiant@rady.ucsd.edu.

Note: R 4.3 or higher is required to use the latest version of Radiant.

Note: User profiles (or user names or logins) containing non-ASCII characters may cause problems during installation. To address this issue please use a profile name (login) that contains ASCII (A-Z, a-z) letters and numbers only. For example, c:\users\myprofilename

Installing R, Rstudio, and Radiant on Windows

To install R, Rstudio, and Radiant on Windows copy-and-paste the command below into Powershell and press the return key.

iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vnijs/radiant_install/main/windows-install -radiant.ps1 | iex

This script will install the latest versions of R, Rstudio, and Radiant-for-R. To run Radiant, open Rstudio and select “Start radiant (browser)” from the Addins menu. If you don’t see “Start radiant (browser)” in Rstudio you can try restarting Rstudio or running “radiant::radiant()” in the console in Rstudio (i.e., the window on the bottom-left in Rstudio).

Installing R, Rstudio, and Radiant on macOS

To install R, Rstudio, and Radiant on macOS copy-and-paste the command below into the Terminal application and press the return key.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vnijs/radiant_install/refs/heads/main/macos-install-radiant.sh | bash

Starting and Stopping

We recommend you use Rstudio to run the Radiant application. When you open Rstudio you can start Radiant through the Addins menu at the top of the screen Start radiant (browser). If for some reason the Start radiant (browser) is not shown in the dropdown, enter radiant::radiant() in the Rstudio console. To close the application click the icon in the navigation bar and then click Stop. The Radiant process will stop and the browser window will close or gray-out.

Sharing Rstudio projects with others

An excellent way to share an Rstudio project hosted online (e.g., on Dropbox) with others is to use the usethis package

install.packages("usethis")
?usethis::use_course

As an example, run the command below to download and open an Rstudio project. Note the “1” at the end of the URL instead of Dropbox’s default which is “0”.

usethis::use_course("https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0dmcr2xsphtn1ha/AADsrYsi8KBkddWx_B-aQbi1a?dl=1")

Documentation

Documentation and tutorials for each of the apps are available at https://radiant-rstats.github.io/docs/ and in the Radiant web interface (the icons on each page and the icon in the navigation bar). See also the pkgdown documentation sites:

Want more help getting started? Watch the tutorials on the documentation site.

Trouble shooting

Windows users may need to start R and Rstudio as administrator. On rare occasions R(studio) may complain that a package is not yet installed when starting Radiant. If so, install the package mentioned using the command below but replace ‘package-that-is-not-yet-installed’ with the package name mentioned in the error message

install.packages("package-that-is-not-yet-installed", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com", type = "binary")

Some users have reported that the Malwarebytes software can inappropriately block R-packages from being installed or updated. If you use Malwarebytes and are experiencing problems you can try (temporarily) turning it off during the install process or when upgrading.

If there is an error installing tinytex on macOS please run the command below from the “terminal” app:

sudo chown -R $(whoami):admin /usr/local/bin; R -e "tinytex::install_tinytex()"

Reporting issues

Rady students can report any issues they might have with Radiant on Piazza. Otherwise, please use the GitHub issue tracker at github.com/radiant-rstats/radiant/issues.