Hello Posit Community! I am teaching a class on quantitative methods for international affairs practitioners. I want them to download Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data using the vdemdata package, which is a wrapper for the V-Dem API. It requires installation of devtools and then installation of the package itself via github, e.g. devtools::install_github("vdeminstitute/vdemdata") because it is not a CRAN package. But when we try to install the package in Posit Cloud we get non-zero exit status error:
Installing package into ‘/cloud/lib/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
* installing *source* package ‘vdemdata’ ...
** using staged installation
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
Killed
Warning message:
In i.p(...) :
installation of package ‘/tmp/Rtmp6Usniq/file1194b5c9c94/vdemdata_13.0.tar.gz’ had non-zero exit status
Is it because this is not a CRAN package or for some other reason?
Here is a link to the vdemdata repo in case it is helpful.
I saw it was getting killed during the *** moving datasets to lazyload DB step and had a feeling it might be a memory issue. I played around with it and found that in order to successfully install the package you need a minimum 5 GB of RAM. However, you will probably want a bit more than that so you don't run out of memory doing your actual work.
It should look like this upon successful installation:
Installing package into ‘/cloud/lib/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.3’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
* installing *source* package ‘vdemdata’ ...
** using staged installation
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded from temporary location
** testing if installed package can be loaded from final location
** testing if installed package keeps a record of temporary installation path
* DONE (vdemdata)