[R] Help installing packages with dependencies for R, behind corporate firewall

[jose.nunez-zuleta at barclays.com]

Hello R-users,

I have no practical experience with the R language itself but I've been tasked to install it behind a corporate firewall. Basic installation seems sane but when my user tries to install a custom library like this:

install.packages("ggplot2")
Installing package into '/home/myuser/rlibs'
(as 'lib' is unspecified)
Warning: unable to access index for repository http://cran.us.r-project.org/src/contrib
Warning message:
package 'ggplot2' is not available (for R version 3.1.2)

See no progress and eventually nothing gets downloaded into my custom directory. My question is, there is a way to add verbosity to R to see if the network proxy setting are working correctly (I can get files using 'wget' without problems under the same account)?

More details about my installation below:

1) I'm behind a firewall with http proxy access. I have no root and made a local installation
2) Contents of my ~/.Renviron:

R_LIBS=/home/myuser/rlibs

3) Contents of ~/.Rprofile:

r <- getOption("repos") # hard code the US repo for CRAN
r["CRAN"] <- "http://cran.us.r-project.org"
options(repos = r)
rm(r)

4) Http environment variable proxy is set (like export http_proxy=XXXXproxy.XXXX.com. I can see it if I do 'Sys.getenv("http_proxy")' from inside the R prompt)

NOTE: I managed to install libraries 'by hand' but for module that have dependencies this doesn't work: 
cd /home/$USER/rlibs/; wget http://cran.us.r-project.org/src/contrib/timeDate_3011.99.tar.gz; /mylocal/R-3.1.2/bin/R CMD INSTALL -l /localrdir timeDate_3011.99.tar.gz

I apologize if this is not the correct list (went through all of them, WIKI and other groups looking for an answer to this issue without much luck).

Thanks,

--Jose
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