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

None of the above answers worked for me on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS using R version 3.6.1

My guess is this might have something to do with Anaconda3...

What worked for me is:

conda install -c r r-devtools 

Then in R

install.packages("rlang")
install.packages("devtools")

I should mention that conda as a package manager for R works great but you should stick to conda as much as you can, i.e. DON'T INSTALL PACKAGES IN R, BUT WITH CONDA (unless there is not a recipe for that package) using either conda-forge, bioconda, and defaults channels (open-source channels); being careful not to mix with proprietary channels (e.g. anaconda, r).

When you need packages that are not available in the channel set you are using, you must install them by hand into an external location outside of the conda environment. For example, .libPaths() shows I have two libraries:

• /home/tsundoku/anaconda3/lib/R/library # where anaconda packages are stored
• /usr/lib/R/library # where I store packages in external location

For a good read on managing .libPaths() see @MilesMcBain's blog-post here