R_HOME Error with rpy2

Question

I know there are quite a few posts on getting up and running with rpy2 on windows 7 32 bit. I have referenced a good number of them and attempted their solutions, including the use of PypeR.

I dont explicitly have a R_HOME variable set in my path, but per this question, I confirmed that R is in my PATH (I can type R at the command line and get R to run) and even copied all of the files from the i386 folder to the parent bin folder.

My issue is pasted below. Any thoughts?

In [5]: from rpy2 import robjects
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RuntimeError                              Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-5-1f019d00d232> in <module>()
----> 1 from rpy2 import robjects

C:\Anaconda\lib\site-packages\rpy2\robjects\__init__.py in <module>()
     16 import rpy2.rlike.container as rlc
     17
---> 18 from rpy2.robjects.robject import RObjectMixin, RObject
     19 from rpy2.robjects.vectors import *
     20 from rpy2.robjects.functions import Function, SignatureTranslatedFunction

C:\Anaconda\lib\site-packages\rpy2\robjects\robject.py in <module>()
      3 import rpy2.rinterface
      4
----> 5 rpy2.rinterface.initr()
      6
      7 import conversion

RuntimeError: R_HOME not defined.

Solution 1

I confirm this issue is related to R_HOME variable not defined.

In my opinion, all of these issues are caused because the developers of rpy2 package haven't documented properly the requirements of their software:

• Install R
• Create R_HOME system variable
• Add R_HOME\bin to the PATH, in order to execute R from python
• Add R_HOME\bin\x64 to the PATH, in order to load R.dll
• Install package tzlocal

Solution 2

With help from the comment above, I got moving in the proper direction. I created the R_HOME as a SYSTEM variable. That didn't work right away, as I was getting an R_USER not defined error.

To get everything the import above to work without error, I simply re-installed the rpy2 exectuable from here after defining the R_HOME. No errors.

In summary, key was o have R_HOME set PRIOR TO installing rpy2.