Jan 1, 2019

Nimble tweak to use specific python version or virtual environment in RStudio

Reticulate made switch between R & Python easy, and doing its best to facilitate both worlds of data science.
Meanwhile, I noticed that most of my followers or students raised the issues of uneasy switch between
different python versions or virtual environments in RStudio while using repl_python().
Here is my nimble tweak, hope, RStudio will come up with a better solution in coming days as in Spyder’s (pointing to interpreter).
As, most of us use, Rprofile.site which will be available in ~/R/etc folder for setting R environment variables,
exploit the same for setting needed python version or virtual environment:

# python version
Sys.setenv(RETICULATE_PYTHON = "~/python37/python.exe")
# python virtual environment
Sys.setenv(RETICULATE_PYTHON = "~/envs/stan_env/python.exe")

Currently, commenting and un-commenting needed version in Rprofile.site, and restarting session
seems to be not a bad nimble tweak for bringing up needed python environment in RStudio.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks. That's very useful to know. A slight variation is adding a project specific .Rprofile (or Renviron). That way you wouldn't need to comment/uncomment.

Thanks