rJava doesn't load in R 3.4.2 and MacOS Sierra

Question

Here's the error I get:

> library(rJava)
Error: package or namespace load failed for ‘rJava’:
 .onLoad failed in loadNamespace() for 'rJava', details:
  call: dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...)
  error: unable to load shared object '/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/library/rJava/libs/rJava.so':
  dlopen(/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/library/rJava/libs/rJava.so, 6): Library not loaded: @rpath/libjvm.dylib
  Referenced from: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/library/rJava/libs/rJava.so
  Reason: image not found

I see this is by no means a unique problem.. I've tried the solutions here, here and here. No success.

Some more details: I'm using R GUI, but I also can't load rJava through R terminal. I also didn't have any issue with rJava on R 3.3.s

Answer 1

You have two options here:

1. get older release of R and use precompiled version of rJava

2. get rJava sources and compile it for yourself

Note that rJava (most recent sources) require some features that are not embedded inside XCode and clang that is available via AppStore. You will need to do some low level stuff when it comes to building rJava package.

You can find detailed instruction here: http://www.owsiak.org/r-3-4-rjava-macos-and-even-more-mess/

If you decide to use older release of R, it's still a struggle to get it working, but way less to do: http://www.owsiak.org/r-java-rjava-and-macos-adventures/

Answer 2

JAVA_HOME path is different for different version of MAC OS. In some cases there is /jre folder and in some cases it is not after /Home director manually go towards /server folder with CD command in terminal and using pwd copy the entire path use that to set the java.home then you can easily load rJava library. This is how I was able to fix the issue

options("java.home"="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-9.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home/lib")

Sys.setenv(LD_LIBRARY_PATH='$JAVA_HOME/server')

dyn.load('/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-9.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home/lib/server/libjvm.dylib')

library(rJava)