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

Error Message: Package libcurl was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libcurl.pc'

Executed this command:

rpm -qa|grep curl

Result

python-pycurl-7.19.0-19.el7.x86_64  
curl-7.29.0-42.el7_4.1.x86_64  
libcurl-7.29.0-42.el7_4.1.x86_64  
-->libcurl-devel-7.29.0-42.el7_4.1.x86_64  <---this entry was missing

Executed this command

yum install libcurl-devel

problem solved.

Answer 2

Your question contains the answer:-

Configuration failed because openssl was not found. Try installing:
 * deb: libssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
 * rpm: openssl-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)
 * csw: libssl_dev (Solaris)
 * brew: openssl@1.1 (Mac OSX)

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

We can use

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev