Installing rgdal on a Mac

October 16, 2011

(This article was first published on Fells Stats » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

So, installing rgdal, which is an important R package for spatial data analysis can be a bit of a pain on the mac. Here are two ways to make it happen.

The Easy Way

In R run: install.packages('rgdal',repos="http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/RWin")

The Hard Way

Download and install GDAL 1.8 Complete and PROJ framework v4.7.0-2 from: http://www.kyngchaos.com/software/frameworks%29
Download the latest version of rgdal from CRAN. Currently 0.7-1
Run Terminal.app, and in the same directory as rgdal_0.7-1.tar.gz run:

R CMD INSTALL --configure-args='--with-gdal-config=/Library/Frameworks/GDAL.framework/Programs/gdal-config --with-proj-include=/Library/Frameworks/PROJ.framework/Headers --with-proj-lib=/Library/Frameworks/PROJ.framework/unix/lib' rgdal_0.7-1.tar.gz