R - devtools Github install fails

Question

Trying to use Hadleys devtools package I am getting a certification error:

install_github("devtools")
Installing github repo(s) devtools/master from hadley
Installing devtools.zip from https://github.com/hadley/devtools/archive/master.zip
  Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE)  : 
  Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates

Google search tells me that this is a curl issue. I am no nearer. Using "git" from the command line I can pick up anything I want from github, - I don't get this error. It only appears when I try to connect to github from R.

I am using ubuntu 12.10, libcurl 7.22.0 and R 3.0

Does anyone have an idea what to do to fix this?

Sincerely H.

Answer 1

This issue is resolved. There was some mismatch between the version of RCurl and the curl library. Re-installing RCurl fixed the problem.

Answer 2

Try

$ git clone git://github.com/hadley/devtools.git
$ R CMD build devtools
$ R CMD install devtools_1.2.99.tar.gz

or just

$ git clone git://github.com/hadley/devtools.git
$ R CMD install devtools

both worked for me on Ubuntu 12.04. Someone else can weigh in on whether there's any difference in building first then installing from tarball or not. I would guess no, but I have no idea

edit: trying this on os X

* installing to library ‘/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library’
* installing *source* package ‘devtools’ ...
** libs
sh: make: command not found
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘devtools’
* removing ‘/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library/devtools’
* restoring previous ‘/Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.0/Resources/library/devtools’