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

First intstall the packages that terra depends on

install.packages("raster")

If you are on Windows, you need to first install Rtools to get a C++ compiler that R can use.

Then, in R, install the package.

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)

Install Homebrew if you have not done so before, and then from the terminal:

brew install pkg-config
brew install gdal

And now, in R, install the package

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

If you get configure: error: libproj not found in standard or given locations. Then you need to install like this

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra", configure-args="--with-proj-lib=/usr/local/lib/")

If you get error unknown type name 'uuid_t' you first need to install Rcpp > 1.0.4 (currently, the development version from github), like this

remotes::install_github("RcppCore/Rcpp.git") 

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 package

remotes::install_github("rspatial/terra")

See the sf instructions for installation on other linux systems --- and for possible updates/improvements on the above instructions.