terra

logo by Zane Dax

terra is an R package for spatial data analysis. There are tutorials at rspatial.org/terra.

stackoverflow is the best place to ask questions if you get stuck. Make sure to include a simple reproducible example. But if you think you have found a bug, please file an issue.

terra replaces the raster package. The interfaces of terra and raster are similar, but terra is simpler, faster and can do more.

Installation

terra is available from CRAN, so you can use install.packages("terra") to get the current released version.

The easiest way to use the development version on Windows or MacOS, is to install it from the R-universe, like this:

install.packages('terra', repos='https://rspatial.r-universe.dev')

To install from source-code, first install the Rcpp package that terra depends on:

install.packages("Rcpp")

And then continue based on the OS you are using.

On Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use. You need a recent version of Rtools42 (rtools42-5355-5357).

Then, in R, install the package.

Sys.setenv("R_REMOTES_NO_ERRORS_FROM_WARNINGS" = "true")
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

On macOS, you can use MacPorts or Homebrew.

With MacPorts you can do

sudo port install R-terra

With Homebrew, you need to first install GDAL:

brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal

Followed by (note the additional configuration argument needed for Homebrew)

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra", configure.args = "--with-proj-lib=$(brew --prefix)/lib/")

To install the CRAN version from source you would do

install.packages("terra", type = "source", configure.args = "--with-proj-lib=$(brew --prefix)/lib/")

The easy way to install terra on Ubuntu is with r2u.

The harder way:

Install the system requirements GDAL (>= 2.2.3), GEOS (>= 3.4.0), PROJ (>= 4.9.3), sqlite3.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgdal-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev

And now, in R, install the package

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems --- and for possible updates/improvements on the above instructions.