Solution. How to install_github when there is a proxy

Question

When you try to install some package of R from GitHub's repository

install_github('rWBclimate', 'ropensci')

If you have the following error:

Installing github repo(s) rWBclimate/master from ropensci
Downloading rWBclimate.zip from https://github.com/ropensci/rWBclimate/archive/master.zip
Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE)  :
Could not resolve host: github.com; Host not found, try again

This error is displayed because R is trying to access on Intenet through a proxy.

Solution 1

SOLUTION

Step 1. Install devtools packages

if (!require("devtools")) install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)

Step 2. Set configuration for our proxy (Please update your information proxy)

library(httr)
set_config(
  use_proxy(url="18.91.12.23", port=8080, username="user",password="password")
)
install_github('rWBclimate', 'ropensci')

Solution 2

If setting proxy configuration does not work (as was the case for me), one can download the package from github to local machine:

Unzip the folder and install it from local machine:

devtools::install("C:/path/to/folder/ggbiplot-master")

Comments

[dmvianna]

set_config and use_proxy are part of the httr library, so one must run require(httr) beforehand.

[Mullefa]

thanks. I added .First <- function() {set_config(use_proxy(...))}; .First(), along with package dependencies, to .Rprofile so that the proxy server is configured automatically on start-up.

[HattrickNZ]

How do I view what the proxy is currently set to?

[airstrike]

To see what your proxy is currently set to, either ping wpad on the command prompt or open chrome://net-internals/#proxy on Google Chrome. The latter is likely an URL to a .wpad file which you can download and read with any text editor. I had to set my username including my domain and auth to NTLM, so the full command was more like: use_proxy(url="X.X.X.X", port=8080, username="MYDOMAIN\\user", password="hunter2", auth="ntlm")

[user1420372]

after much trial and error I got this to work as follows: with_config(use_proxy(url="bcproxy.<DNS.Suffix>:8080", username="<MYDOMAIN\\user>", password=getPass(), auth="ntlm"), devtools::install_github('hadley/ggplot2')). This required the getPass package