installing R gsl package on Mac

Question

I'm trying to install the gsl package for R, which I understand is simply a wrapper around the GSL, under OSX Mavericks. I've tried the obvious:

> install.packages('gsl')
Installing package into ‘/Users/myusername/Library/R/3.1/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)

   package ‘gsl’ is available as a source package but not as a binary

Warning in install.packages :
  package ‘gsl’ is not available (for R version 3.1.0)

So I ran

> install.packages('gsl',type = 'source')
Installing package into ‘/Users/myusername/Library/R/3.1/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/gsl_1.9-10.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 342803 bytes (334 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 334 Kb

* installing *source* package ‘gsl’ ...
** package ‘gsl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
checking for gsl-config... no
configure: error: gsl-config not found, is GSL installed?
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘gsl’
* removing ‘/Users/myusername/Library/R/3.1/library/gsl’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘gsl’ had non-zero exit status

No GSL install. D'oh! So I install GSL via Homebrew:

~  brew install gsl
==> Downloading http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/gsl/gsl-1.15.tar.gz
######################################################################## 100.0%
==> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/gsl/1.15
==> make
==> make install
  /usr/local/Cellar/gsl/1.15: 239 files, 6.7M, built in 101 seconds

Try to install the R package again:

> install.packages('gsl',type = 'source')
Installing package into ‘/Users/myusername/Library/R/3.1/library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'http://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/gsl_1.9-10.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 342803 bytes (334 Kb)
opened URL
==================================================
downloaded 334 Kb

* installing *source* package ‘gsl’ ...
** package ‘gsl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
checking for gsl-config... /usr/local/bin/gsl-config
checking if GSL version >= 1.12... checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
configure: error: Need GSL version >= 1.12
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘gsl’
* removing ‘/Users/myusername/Library/R/3.1/library/gsl’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘gsl’ had non-zero exit status

I'm obviously going about this the wrong way but am unsure about where exactly the problem lies.

Answer 1

I was able to get things working (OS X Yosemite 10.10, R 3.1.1, gsl 1.16, gsl R package 1.9-10) with standard brew-installed R and gsl by manually prefixing CFLAGS and LDFLAGS with the output from gsl-config --cflags and gsl-config --libs respectively.

The following:

CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/gsl/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/gsl/lib -lgsl -lgslcblas" R
...
> install.packages("gsl")

worked for me.

Note that gsl-config lists the direct path to my Cellar, the paths above are brew symlinks.

Answer 2

For Mac, just run:

brew install gsl

then install the package in r

Answer 3

I finally got this to work though I'm not sure which parts of the following are absolutely essential. Here's a step-by-step list of instructions:

(steps in parentheses may be optional. Perhaps the whole thing works with homebrew)

1. (download the latest version of the GSL from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gsl/ (as of this writing the file to get is gsl-1.16.tar.gz))
2. (open up a terminal window, untar the file, cd into the directory and then run ./configure, make and make install)
3. download the sources to the R package from http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/gsl/index.html
4. open up a terminal window and run launchctl setenv PATH "/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
5. in the same terminal window, build the R package (I couldn't get this to work from within R) by untar'ing the file just downloaded, cding into the directory and then running R CMD build ./gsl and R CMD INSTALL gsl_1.9-10.tar.gz