Cannot Install without Rust Toolchain

[jaredlander]

The instructions at https://valve.josiahparry.com/ make it seem like the R package can be installed without the Rust toolchain. It fact, it says that the binaries exist for Linux.

It is available as a binary for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX thanks to R-universe.

But when you install the package without having the Tust toolchain

install.packages("valve", repos = c("https://josiahparry.r-universe.dev", "https://cloud.r-project.org"))

you get this error

trying URL 'https://josiahparry.r-universe.dev/src/contrib/valve_0.1.3.tar.gz'
Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 300036 bytes (293 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 293 KB

* installing *source* package ‘valve’ ...
** using staged installation
** libs
using C compiler: ‘gcc (Ubuntu 11.4.0-1ubuntu1~22.04) 11.4.0’
rm -Rf valve.so ./rust/target/release/libvalve.a entrypoint.o
/usr/bin/gcc -I"/opt/R/4.4.0/lib/R/include" -DNDEBUG   -I/usr/local/include    -fpic  -g -O2  -c entrypoint.c -o entrypoint.o
# In some environments, ~/.cargo/bin might not be included in PATH, so we need
# to set it here to ensure cargo can be invoked. It is appended to PATH and
# therefore is only used if cargo is absent from the user's PATH.
if [ "" != "true" ]; then \
	export CARGO_HOME=/tmp/RtmpFH3uJ7/R.INSTALL2214c4bc818f5/valve/src/.cargo; \
fi && \
	export PATH="/home/jared/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/snap/bin:/bin:/opt/quarto/bin:/usr/lib/rstudio-server/bin/postback:/home/jared/.cargo/bin" && \
	cargo build --lib --bin valve --release --manifest-path=./rust/Cargo.toml \
		--target-dir ./rust/target && \
		cp ./rust/target/release/valve ../inst;
/bin/bash: line 5: cargo: command not found
make: *** [Makevars:16: rust/target/release/libvalve.a] Error 127
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘valve’
* removing ‘/home/jared/projects/fakeapi/renv/library/linux-ubuntu-jammy/R-4.4/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/valve’

The downloaded source packages are in
	‘/tmp/Rtmpm4Owqx/downloaded_packages’
Warning message:
In utils::install.packages("valve", repos = c("https://josiahparry.r-universe.dev",  :
  installation of package ‘valve’ had non-zero exit status

This makes it look like it is compiling. And I can confirm that after installing rustup that the package compiles, installs, can be loaded and has the valve executable.

So it seems like the binaries are not being served by R-Universe.

[JosiahParry]

Thanks, Jared! May I ask what version of R you're using? From what I can see r-universe has binaries for 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5

[jaredlander]

Tried on both 4.4.0 and 4.4.1.

[jaredlander]

4.4.0 was on R installed directly on my Ubuntu 22 machine and 4.4.1 was inside the rstudio/plumber:v1.2.0 image which is Ubuntu 22.04.4.

[JosiahParry]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was busy moving cross country!

I can reproduce this. You can install the binary directly with:

FROM rstudio/plumber:v1.2.0
ENTRYPOINT ["R"]

Build it with

docker build -t test . && docker run -it test

Install binary directly

install.packages("https://josiahparry.r-universe.dev/bin/linux/noble/4.4/src/contrib/valve_0.1.3.tar.gz")

[JosiahParry]

Coming back to this a bit more. The case of r-universe not providing useful binaries is unfortunate and means that r-universe doesn't address the gap that i thought it did.

In the case of valve would precompiled binaries for the cli tool be useful? The R package is a bit tougher to do, though. I'll think that through.

[jaredlander]

I think my workaround was to do something with the CLI, so that's not the end of the world, for my use case at least.

For the R binaries, could you use a matrix in GitHub actions to build binaries for a bunch of different OSes?