Installing and using rJava-dependent libraries on AWS EC2

Question

I am using the machine image available here to host an RStudio server off of EC2 on which I will want to run analysis, in part using xlsx and rvest, both of which require Java and R to cooperate which they do not out of the box. I searched for a few solutions and tried to implement them, but got pretty much nowhere.

I SSH'd into the machine, and entered java -version and got this:

The program 'java' can be found in the following packages:
 * default-jre
 * gcj-5-jre-headless
 * openjdk-8-jre-headless
 * gcj-4.8-jre-headless
 * gcj-4.9-jre-headless
 * openjdk-9-jre-headless
Try: sudo apt install <selected package>

so I'm not sure what to do with that. I tried running sudo apt-get install r-cran-rjava which was also recommend on StackOverflow, and got this error:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package r-cran-rjava

and likewise when I try to run sudo R CMD javareconf this is what I get:

*** JAVA_HOME is not a valid path, ignoring

*** Cannot find any Java interpreter
*** Please make sure 'java' is on your PATH or set JAVA_HOME correspondingly

I searched for Java it's stored here: java: /usr/share/java and I'm not sure how to set JAVA_HOME correctly, or how to set Java correctly.

What should I do?

Answer 1

Installing RJava (Ubuntu)

First, we need Java itself, check if it's installed

Write in Terminal: java -version

but you already checked it, so you need to install it.

If it returns The program java can be found in the following packages, then Java hasn't been installed yet, so execute the following command: sudo apt-get install default-jre . This will install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Then Install JDK

Write in Terminal: sudo apt-get install default-jdk

Then assotiate the JDK installed with R

Run in Terminal: sudo R CMD javareconf

Install RJava and Rgdal

Execute: sudo apt-get install r-cran-rjava

Then: sudo apt-get install libgdal1-dev libproj-dev

Install package in RStudio

Run in RStudio: install.packages("rJava")

Done!