Installing devtools fails due to the dependency, but the dependency is not available for the version of R that I have

Question

configure: error: 
---------------------------------------------
  OpenSSL library required

  Please install:
  libssl-dev (deb) or openssl-devel (rpm)
---------------------------------------------
See `config.log' for more details
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘git2r’
 * removing ‘/home/udi/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/git2r’
ERROR: dependency ‘openssl’ is not available for package ‘httr’
 * removing ‘/home/udi/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/httr’
ERROR: dependencies ‘httr’, ‘git2r’ are not available for package ‘devtools’
 * removing ‘/home/udi/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.2/devtools’

However, when I try to install libssl-dev (I have Ubuntu 14.04.3), I get the message "libssl-dev is not available (for version R.2.2.2)."

Any idea what to do? Download the new version of R or is there another solution?

Answer 1

This is a system package, not an R. package. On the command line, you can run

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Answer 2

What fixes the problem in my Ubuntu, it fixes this:

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev

This is not immediately visible unless you complete:

install.packages("git2r")

he will throw this error:

The zlib library that is required to build
   git2r was not found.

   Please install:
     zlib1g-dev (package on e.g. Debian and Ubuntu)
     zlib-devel (package on e.g. Fedora, CentOS and RHEL)
   and try again.