How to run Julia and R in LyX via knitr
Shuvomoy Das Gupta
May 6, 2025
Abstract
In this blog, we will discuss how to install and run Julia and R from LyX using knitr.
1 What is knitr?
Relevant resources.
• Yihui Xie. Dynamic Documents with R
and knitr, Second Edition. Chapman and
Hall/CRC, 2017.
• Yihui Xie, Christophe Dervieux, and Emily
Riederer. R markdown cookbook. Chapman
and Hall/CRC, 2020. Available at:
• A LyX demo by Yihui Xie available at:
• A knit-manual for LyX by Yihui Xie available
at:
The knitr package is a general-purpose literate programming tool that allows us to create document formats including LA-
TEX, HTML, and Markdown while running programming languages such as R, Python, Julia, C++, more in the same doc-
ument. Not only that, we can use knitr as a literate programming tool for running code such as Julia code in a LyX document.
It is actually written in R, so for it to work properly, we will go through the following steps.
2 Install R, RStudio, and Julia
• First, install Julia from and install R from
• After installing Julia and R, add the location of the R folder (could be something like )
to your path. For example, if the operating system is windows, then go to ‘edit the system environment variables‘ then on
‘system variables‘ select ‘Path‘ ⇒ ‘Edit‘ ⇒ ‘New‘ and paste the R folder location (e.g., ).
You may need to restart the computer for it to take effect.
• Okay, great. Now open Julia REPL, and from there run (note that will be different for different OS etc,
ensure that it is associated with the same R folder location added to path in the earlier step, with the location of the R binary
e.g., ‘‘ removed)
• Next, install RStudio from
• Now in RStudio, we will run the folloing lines one by one in the console:
After running all these, it is time for testing if knitr is working as expected in RStudio. For that, in RStudio, go to ⇒
⇒ and paste the following content in the file and test if you can test each code chunks by pressing the
green run button.
3 Install LyX and set it up to run knitr
I will assume that a tex distribution such as TeXlive is installed. Now, first, install LyX from . Now go
through the following steps:
1. Open a new L
Y
X document;
2. Go to ▷ ▷ and insert the module named Rnw (knitr);
3. Add code highlighting via ▷
at the very beginning of the LyX document (before title etc) and paste the fol-
lowing code
4. Then insert the following Julia code in the document with either Insert ▷ T
E
X Code or the Custom Insets ▷ Chunk
environment:
which after compilation, will look like the following:
# This is Julia code
function
return
end
## my_add (generic function with 1 method)
Let us test the chunk called ‘my_add‘ as follows. We do so by adding the following chunk (with either Insert ▷ T
E
X Code or
the Custom Insets ▷ Chunk environment again)
,which, on the compiled pdf, will look like:
# This is Julia code
## 15
