rig

rig is a lightweight command-line utility developed by Posit Software, PBC that acts as the official R Installation Manager for Windows, macOS and Linux systems, enabling data scientists, statisticians and IT administrators to install, remove or switch between multiple R versions without manual registry edits or path adjustments. Designed to eliminate dependency conflicts that often arise when different projects require different R releases, the tool maintains a central catalogue of every R build from 3.3.0 onward, downloads the selected installer automatically, and places each version in an isolated directory that can be activated on demand through a single rig switch command. Typical use cases include reproducing legacy analyses that depend on older packages, testing code against the R-devel branch before submission to CRAN, teaching environments where students must share a common configuration, and continuous-integration pipelines that need to validate packages across a matrix of R releases. The software also exposes sub-commands for setting default libraries, updating Bioconductor versions, and registering R installations with popular IDEs such as Posit Workbench, VS Code and RStudio. Since its initial release the project has iterated through four public versions, culminating in the current rig 0.7.1 build that introduces Apple Silicon support, proxy-aware downloads, and a quiet unattended mode suited for enterprise deployment scripts. The program is distributed under the MIT license and is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always delivering the latest version and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.

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