tar error install_github

[kuzmenkov111]

Hello!

I have a trouble with remotes::install_github("user/package"). R 3.5.1 Microsoft R Open. Ubuntu 18.04 in container. There is an error in tar after just rebuilding container without changing anything.

remotes::install_github('rstudio/DT') Downloading GitHub repo rstudio/DT@master tar: This does not look like a tar archive gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now tar: This does not look like a tar archive gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file tar: Child returned status 1 tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now Error in getrootdir(untar(src, list = TRUE)) : length(file_list) > 0 is not TRUE Calls: <Anonymous> ... source_pkg -> decompress -> getrootdir -> stopifnot In addition: Warning messages: 1: In utils::untar(tarfile, ...) : ‘tar -xf '/tmp/RtmpitCFRe/file2677442609b8.tar.gz' -C '/tmp/RtmpitCFRe/remotes267752f2629f'’ returned error code 2 2: In system(cmd, intern = TRUE) : running command 'tar -tf '/tmp/RtmpitCFRe/file2677442609b8.tar.gz'' had status 2 Execution halted

May tell me what is going wrong?

[jimhester]

It looks like your tar program is not working correctly, or possibly the download is not complete. What does Sys.getenv("tar") return?

[alexvorobiev]

I ran it in the debugger. At least in my case the issue was not with tar. The real issue is the default download method (curl) does not follow HTTP redirects (and gives no warnings about that). The result is a zero-length file which tar cannot unpack. I don't know whether it is github itself or corporate firewalls/proxy/MITM. The workaround is to add this curl option

options(download.file.extra = paste0("-L ", getOption("download.file.extra", default = ""))

After that install_github works again.

[mvabl-steve]

I am having this issue too, and I just can't figure it out. Sys.getenv("tar") yields [1] "".Sys.getenv("TAR") gives [1] "/usr/bin/tar". I'm a novice developer. Anyone have any explicit suggestions I can learn from?

MacBook Air (13-inch, 2017)
Mojave 10.14.4

platform       x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0   
arch           x86_64                      
os             darwin15.6.0                
system         x86_64, darwin15.6.0        
status                                     
major          3                           
minor          5.2                         
year           2018                        
month          12                          
day            20                          
svn rev        75870                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 3.5.2 (2018-12-20)
nickname       Eggshell Igloo       

RStudio Version 1.1.423

[nextpagesoft]

I have had the same issue (Ubuntu 19.04, R 3.6.0). First of all check if the downloaded file tar.gz has any content at all. Name of the file is included in the error message. In @kuzmenkov111 post it is '/tmp/RtmpitCFRe/file2677442609b8.tar.gz' and you can do that in R with:

file.info("/tmp/RtmpitCFRe/file2677442609b8.tar.gz")

In my case it had size 0 so clearly downloading was not successful, so I started digging in.

Line 73 in function base_download selects download method. In my case getOption("download.file.method") was returning curl. Setting it to libcurl:

options("download.file.method" = "libcurl")

cured the problem with no content and devtools::install_github succeeded.

I don't know how option "curl" was set in the first place. Maybe this is what R 3.6.0 defaults to.

[DaveParr]

Same issue, macOS Mojave, 10.14.4, R 3.6.

This exact issue has hit me multiple times with multiple packages now. And

options(download.file.extra = paste0("-L ", getOption("download.file.extra", default = ""))) has worked each time so far.