Updating Positron

As of build 2025.03.0-116, Positron automatically checks for updates from our channel of monthly prereleases.

You can opt out of this automatic checking by changing the update.mode setting to "none"; see our page on privacy and data collection for more details.

We’re currently also making releases available approximately weekly, for users who are interested in trying out new features at a faster cadence. You can find these releases on GitHub, and may be interested in the following helpers to manage these manual updates.

macOS

There is a shell script available that you can use to download and install the latest version available via GitHub. First, download the update script and mark it executable:

curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/juliasilge/a74883871e98afe67b01cd9125b104c7/raw/1514a69bda59f2837184bd7c372889885c138d51/update-positron.sh -o update-positron.sh

chmod u+x update-positron.sh

You can optionally put the script on your $PATH so you can run it from any directory. You only need to download and set up the shell script like this one time.

Then you can download and install the latest version of Positron via:

./update-positron.sh
Note

Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t check your current version of Positron; it will always download and install the latest version.

Windows

We don’t yet officially maintain Positron on Windows package managers, but you can install the latest version of Positron via scoop or winget thanks to the efforts of community maintainers.

Scoop Package Manager

# Add the bucket that has Positron (only need to do this once)
scoop bucket add r-bucket https://github.com/cderv/r-bucket.git

# install 
scoop install positron

# update
scoop update positron

This bucket is managed by Christophe Dervieux.

Winget Package Manager

# install
winget install --id Posit.Positron

# upgrade 
winget upgrade --id Posit.Positron

This is community maintained, via automated PR to the central manifest repository.