EMR 014 R 3.6.2 on EMR - qyjohn/AWS_Tutorials GitHub Wiki

By default, EMR installs R-3.4.1 from the Amazon repository. However, I have been successful in manually compiling and installing R-3.6.2 on the master node on my EMR cluster with EMR release version 5.29.0.

cd ~
sudo yum install bzip2-devel pcre-devel curl-devel

wget https://cran.csiro.au/src/base/R-3/R-3.6.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf R-3.6.2.tar.gz
cd R-3.6.2

./configure --with-readline=no --with-x=no
make
sudo make install

If you want to have R-3.6.2 on all the nodes in the EMR cluster, we recommend that you start with a clean version of Amazon Linux, use the above-mention steps to compile and install R-3.6.2, then create an AMI to be used for your EMR clusters. This way, the EMR cluster will be launched with R-3.6.2 pre-installed on all nodes. For more information on using custom AMI on your EMR cluster, please refer to the following AWS documentation:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ManagementGuide/emr-custom-ami.html