terra is a R package is a replacement of the raster package.
It has a very similar, but simpler, interface, and it is much faster.
All native computations are done in C++. Classes, methods and properties are exposed via a Rcpp module. The R side has two main S4 classes (SpatRaster and SpatVector) that represent spatial data. These classes have only slot, a reference to a C++ object. They are used to provide a "normal" "S4" R user-interface as in the raster package.
terra is available from CRAN, so you can use `install.packages("terra").
See below for instructions on installing the development version
If you are on Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use. After that, you need the first install development version of "raster" for "terra" to work.
Then, in R, install the packages.
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
The libraries GDAL (>= 2.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 4.8.0) are required (as for sf)
With Homebrew you can do:
brew install gdal
And now, in R, install the packages.
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
The libraries GDAL (>= 2.0.0), GEOS (>= 3.3.0) and Proj.4 (>= 4.8.0) are required (as for sf)
To install these on Ubuntu you can do:
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 packages.
remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")
See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems --- and for possible updates/improvements on the above instructions.