R/ RStudio - install devtools fails?

Question

I am trying to install devtools in my RStudio. But I get tons of errors:

* installing *source* package ‘curl’ ...
** package ‘curl’ successfully unp         


        

Answer 1

The error messages may be a bit confusing, because RStudio is asking you to install libcurl and openssl libraries for your Linux OS; for those you actually need Ubuntu packages instead of R packages.

Open a command line terminal, and type

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev 

Once the installation of your Ubuntu packages is completed, try again and you'll be able to install the devtools R package