Build & Reload in RStudio on Windows: devtools::document() says devtools not found

Question

When I click "Build & Reload" on the Build tab within RStudio, I get the following error:

==> devtools::document(roclets=c('rd', 'collate', 'namespace'))

Error in loadNamespace(name) : there is no package called 'devtools'
Calls: suppressPackageStartupMessages ... tryCatch -> tryCatchList -> tryCatchOne -> <Anonymous>
Execution halted

Exited with status 1.

But when I just enter devtools::document(roclets=c('rd', 'collate', 'namespace')) directly into the console, it works.

In addition, if I uncheck "Build & Reload" under "Automatically roxygenize when running:" in the Build Tools -> Roxygen config, the error disappears.

I've installed the latest devtools with devtools::install_github("hadley/devtools"). I'm using Windows.

If anyone has an suggestions, thank you in advance!

Answer 1

I had to uncheck "Build & Reload" under "Automatically reoxygenize when running:" in the Build Tools -> Roxygen Configure menu. Installing devtools in the program files/r/3.2.3/lib helped, but it still wanted all the dependencies there as well. Using packrat didn't seem to help either..

Answer 2

Here's a convenient solution based on mathematical.coffee's comment:

Just run this from Rstudio:

writeLines("install.packages('devtools', repos = 'https://cran.rstudio.com/')", "inst.R")
system("Rscript --vanilla inst.R")

Answer 3

I encountered this problem multiple times and also with other packages related to devtools (e.g. knitr in the devtools::check()). As it was getting on my nerves, I tried to install devtools in other location of .libPaths(), i.e. in the first standard one (in my case it was /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/). It was telling me that I needed sudo rights. I gave them (as I was utterly annoyed by this) but still, it is needed a large number of dependencies. Therefore, my practical solution was to sudo-copy my "special" R library folder into the standard one. The following code fixed all my problems:

sudo cp -rf /home/myname/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.4/* /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/

I would like to point out that this is the only effective solution I found. Even so, it lacks elegance and I would definitely prefer if the guys from Rstudio provide a way to link Rstudio to a personally-defined library. It was already my case on startup and I had to add my personal lib to .libPaths() in the file Rprofile.site which is run every time on R startup, but this did not solve the above problem anyhow.