Installing packages on work laptop

[rewer]

Hi there,

I have RStudio (1.1.447) and R 3.6.0 installed on my work laptop. These were installed years ago in a standard way (with admin rights). However, there was a change in policy and our IT support is not willing to install updated versions anymore.

I have downloaded and installed (without admin rights) newer versions of R (3.6.3, 4.3.2) and zipped versions of RStudio. However, when I switch to R 4.3.2 I can no longer install packages ("unable to access index for repository https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib: cannot open URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/PACKAGES'"). I have tried different mirrors with the same results.

The funny thing is that when I switch to R 3.6.3 (which was also installed without admin rights) everything works just fine.

Does anybody have any idea what is going on here and how to resolve this issue?

Thanks a lot.

[Gabor]

Please include the full output of both

sessionInfo()

and

install.packages("praise")

[rewer]

> sessionInfo()
R version 4.3.2 (2023-10-31 ucrt)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19045)

Matrix products: default


locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=Czech_Czechia.utf8  LC_CTYPE=Czech_Czechia.utf8    LC_MONETARY=Czech_Czechia.utf8
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                   LC_TIME=Czech_Czechia.utf8    

time zone: Europe/Prague
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.3.2 tools_4.3.2   

> install.packages("praise")
Warning in install.packages :
  unable to access index for repository https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib:
  cannot open URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/PACKAGES'
WARNING: Rtools is required to build R packages but is not currently installed. Please download and install the appropriate version of Rtools before proceeding:

https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/Rtools/
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/******/R/R-Library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
Warning in install.packages :
  unable to access index for repository https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib:
  cannot open URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/PACKAGES'
Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘praise’ is not available for this version of R

A version of this package for your version of R might be available elsewhere,
see the ideas at
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-admin.html#Installing-packages
Warning in install.packages :
  unable to access index for repository https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.3:
  cannot open URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/windows/contrib/4.3/PACKAGES'

[Gabor]

Do you have a proxy? I think this is probably Proxy support broken, cannot install any packages anymore - #8 by gsiemon

[rewer]

Adding method="wininet" solved the issue. Does it mean we have a proxy :-)? Anyways, thanks for your help.

[Gabor]

Yes, that almost surely means that you have a proxy.