Install rCharts package on R 2.15.2

Question

I am currently trying to install the Ramnath Vaidyanathan's rCharts package. On his github repository it recommends that we install the package using:

require(devtools)
install_github('rCharts', 'ramnathv')

However, I cannot install the devtools package because it requires R 3.0.0. I am running R 2.15.2 on a server that runs on Ubuntu 12.10. Updating to R 3.0.0 is not an option because certain other packages that I need have not been rebuilt for R 3.0.0 yet. So I cannot install using the install_github function because I cannot install devtools.

I then tried to download the tarball from here and install using R CMD INSTALL. However, attempting to install via:

 R CMD INSTALL ramnathv-rCharts-b1061ab.tar.gz

Results in the following error:

Error in untar2(tarfile, files, list, exdir) : unsupported entry type ‘g’

I am not sure what next steps to try to install the rCharts package.

Answer 1

Download devtools 1.1 source code from here and then install inside R.

You can just use this script if you like (note if you have more than one library location this will install into the first library location on your .libPath():

dl <- "http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/devtools/devtools_1.1.tar.gz"
fl <- "~/devtools_1.1.tar.gz"
download.file( dl , fl )
install.packages( fl , lib = .libPaths()[1] , repos = NULL , type = "source" )
require( devtools , lib.loc = .libPaths()[1] )
install_github('rCharts', 'ramnathv')

Answer 2

Okay, so I don't know if I deserve credit for this answer, but this is the answer that worked for me. Go here: for the full run down:

http://withr.me/blog/2013/07/23/configure-shiny-server-under-ubuntu/

Essentially, this site provides the answer which is the following:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/amd64/server
R CMD javareconf # Let R know the configuration of Java;
install.packages(c('RJDBC', 'XLConnect', 'devtools', 'RJSONIO'))
require(devtools)
install_github('rCharts', 'ramnathv')

But if you've not installed shiny server, I would go through the full run down provided at that site. It's essentially a replicate of this site: https://github.com/rstudio/shiny-server/wiki/Ubuntu-step-by-step-install-instructions, but the first site has the above instructions and BAM!!! it works. Now I've got devtools on Ubuntu (something that had been a real pain) and I've been able to download rcharts. For leaflet, checkout:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shiny-discuss/V7WUQA7aAiI

Joe Cheng shows how to install that as well as shinyDash. I know Ramnath has leaflet in the rCharts package, but, I'm not able to invoke it with library(leaflet) after installing the rCharts package. So I simply did what Joe said (after all these instructions and typed:

devtools::install_github('leaflet-shiny', 'jcheng5')
devtools::install_github('ShinyDash', 'trestletech')

I don't know if you're needing these, but I do know that if you're recreating some things that Ramnath has done with rCharts, you might find yourself needing these other packages (esp. Leaflet).

I hope this helps, because it certainly helped me!