diff --git a/R/README.md b/R/README.md
index 005f56da1670cfbdc702fadbb96db90f57ece6e1..bb3464ba9955d007a9e59b15bc2cc09382f7f0f1 100644
--- a/R/README.md
+++ b/R/README.md
@@ -1,6 +1,16 @@
 # R on Spark
 
 SparkR is an R package that provides a light-weight frontend to use Spark from R.
+### Installing sparkR
+
+Libraries of sparkR need to be created in `$SPARK_HOME/R/lib`. This can be done by running the script `$SPARK_HOME/R/install-dev.sh`.
+By default the above script uses the system wide installation of R. However, this can be changed to any user installed location of R by setting the environment variable `R_HOME` the full path of the base directory where R is installed, before running install-dev.sh script.
+Example: 
+```
+# where /home/username/R is where R is installed and /home/username/R/bin contains the files R and RScript
+export R_HOME=/home/username/R
+./install-dev.sh
+```
 
 ### SparkR development
 
diff --git a/R/install-dev.sh b/R/install-dev.sh
index 4972bb9217072a58acb7525008cb31253345c23c..befd413c4cd26490ce4b4d6262518637ff3c04b9 100755
--- a/R/install-dev.sh
+++ b/R/install-dev.sh
@@ -35,12 +35,19 @@ LIB_DIR="$FWDIR/lib"
 mkdir -p $LIB_DIR
 
 pushd $FWDIR > /dev/null
+if [ ! -z "$R_HOME" ]
+  then
+    R_SCRIPT_PATH="$R_HOME/bin"
+   else
+    R_SCRIPT_PATH="$(dirname $(which R))"
+fi
+echo "USING R_HOME = $R_HOME"
 
 # Generate Rd files if devtools is installed
-Rscript -e ' if("devtools" %in% rownames(installed.packages())) { library(devtools); devtools::document(pkg="./pkg", roclets=c("rd")) }'
+"$R_SCRIPT_PATH/"Rscript -e ' if("devtools" %in% rownames(installed.packages())) { library(devtools); devtools::document(pkg="./pkg", roclets=c("rd")) }'
 
 # Install SparkR to $LIB_DIR
-R CMD INSTALL --library=$LIB_DIR $FWDIR/pkg/
+"$R_SCRIPT_PATH/"R CMD INSTALL --library=$LIB_DIR $FWDIR/pkg/
 
 # Zip the SparkR package so that it can be distributed to worker nodes on YARN
 cd $LIB_DIR