R, AWS Windows, CRAN packages installation

Question

I have an AWS (Amazon Web Services) virtual machine, and it is a Windows machine. I downloaded R and installed (R-2.7.2-win32). When I tried to install a CRAN package,

install.packages("rcdk")

I always got massage like:

“Warning: unable to access index for repository https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/2.7”

I guess the AWS server restricted R accessing the internet. I went to firewall “Allow an app or feature through Windows Firewall”, and I allowed “R for Windows front-end” to access Private and Public firewall. It did not solve the problem.

How can I configure AWS windows, so R can install packages?

The current version of R is 3.2.5. Did you really install 2.7? That's very out of date. — MrFlick, Aug 21 '17 at 22:30

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 22 '17 at 03:16

I guess the AWS server restricted R accessing the internet

Absolutely not: AWS does not filter such resources.

Your problem is simply that https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib only contains versions 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.16, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5.

So, you have 2 solutions:

either change your remote repository witch such an utility as install.packages to point to an old repository that could contain an archive of the 2.7 version (see https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-patched/R-admin.html#Setting-up-a-package-repository)
or, easier, remove your relatively old R-2.7.2-win32 and install something more recent, at least version 2.13, on your Windows host at AWS.

You are right. I uninstalled version 2.7, and reinstalled R 3.4. The problem was solved. Thank you very much. — Duan Liu, Aug 22 '17 at 04:02

R, AWS Windows, CRAN packages installation

1 Answers1