Installing nloptr on Linux - fatal error: nlopt.h: No such file or directory

Question

Another cry for help installing the nloptr package on Linux (Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS). I looked through many questions, but could not find a solution for this.

I cannot install the lme4 package in R (version 3.3.1 / Rstudio Version 0.99.902), since installing nloptr has a non-zero exit status. When i try

install.package("nloptr") 

I get the following:

 Installing package into '/home/rd14/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3' (as 'lib' is unspecified) trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/nloptr_1.0.4.tar.gz' Content type 'unknown' length 353942 bytes (345 KB) ================================================== downloaded 345 KB * installing *source* package 'nloptr' ... ** package 'nloptr' successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked checking for g++... g++ checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out checking for suffix of executables... checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... g++ -E checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... (cached) yes checking whether g++ accepts -g... (cached) yes checking for pkg-config... yes configure: Now testing for NLopt header file. checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /bin/grep checking for egrep... /bin/grep -E checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking nlopt.h usability... no checking nlopt.h presence... no checking for nlopt.h... no configure: Need to download and build NLopt trying URL 'http://ab-initio.mit.edu/nlopt/nlopt-2.4.2.tar.gz' Content type 'application/x-gzip' length 2361992 bytes (2.3 MB) ================================================== downloaded 2.3 MB configure: Starting to install library to /tmp/Rtmp7A1ldT/R.INSTALL66fffc391ed/nloptr/nlopt-2.4.2 configure: Done installing library to /tmp/Rtmp7A1ldT/R.INSTALL66fffc391ed/nloptr/nlopt-2.4.2 configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating src/Makevars ** libs g++ -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c dummy.cpp -o dummy.o gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/share/R/include -DNDEBUG -I/tmp/Rtmp7A1ldT/R.INSTALL66fffc391ed/nloptr/nlopt-2.4.2/include -fpic -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -g -c nloptr.c -o nloptr.o nloptr.c:42:19: fatal error: nlopt.h: No such file or directory #include "nlopt.h" ^ compilation terminated. make: *** [nloptr.o] Error 1 ERROR: compilation failed for package 'nloptr' * removing '/home/rd14/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/3.3/nloptr' Warning in install.packages : installation of package 'nloptr' had non-zero exit status The downloaded source packages are in '/tmp/Rtmp4Y3TXJ/downloaded_packages' 

Your help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Answer 1

When Jelmer and I created this setup, it just worked on my Ubuntu machines and continues to do this - either with loading and nlopt , or through the system library.

As you are on Ubuntu, the easiest solution for you is probably to just install the nlopt library, which the nloptr package will detect and use. So that

 sudo apt-get install libnlopt-dev 

and then try installing nlopt again.

Similarly, you should get lme4 as r-cran-lme4 from Michael r-cran-lme4 's respective PPAs, as described in README for Ubuntu in CRAN.