Install (R)QGIS

Complete instructions on installing R with QGIS (which includes installing SAGA), are found in this excellent how-to document by Jannes Muenchow, Patrick Schratz

(R)QGIS installation guide for Windows, Mac & Linux

If you have already done a stand-alone install of QGIS on Windows and want to add on SAGA for R to run, consider the following option:

1) Install SAGA from https://sourceforge.net/projects/saga-gis/

2) Extract the SAGA application, then move the entire folder (such as saga-5.0.0_x64) to a secure path, such as: C:\Program Files\

3) If you had QGIS running, quit the application, then launch QGIS again

4) In QGIS go to Processing > Options > Providers > SAGA and make sure that the setting for "SAGA folder" is set to the correct path (where you pasted the application folder).

5) If you get a warning that the system cannot find "msys" folder, you may have to tweak some settings for other applications, such as GRASS in the Processing > Options > Providers as explained here

Once you have the packages installed, you should be able to run R, from the Processing Toolbox.

Custom R Script example Here is a nice explanation of how to write a custom script in R that takes inputs from shapefiles and .csv that have been added to the QGIS Map Canvas: QGIS and R sampling example

Note: the script works when you DRAG the input files onto the Map Canvas, but not when you ADD VECTOR DATA. This has to do with forward slash / vs. backslash \ that gets picked up in the path to the source file. Explanation of this problem.

using R with QGIS video

English: QGIS 2.18 with R 3.4.1 on Windows, Youtube Video, 12m58s