Manually installing rwinlib extras

[adamrobinson361]

I am trying to install the curl package from source on a machine with no internet access. Unsurprisingly i get this error as i dont have libcurl on the machine:

Error in download.file(sprintf("https://github.com/rwinlib/libcurl/archive/v%s.zip",  : 
  cannot open URL 'https://github.com/rwinlib/libcurl/archive/v7.59.0.zip'

Upon a lot of research i understand that rtools has what you call goodies which can be manually downloaded. See here and this github organisation.

What i have not found is any guide anywhere on how these can be manually installed. This is probably something really simple if you know how to do it/ know c++ but are you able to let me know how i am meant to install the R goodies e.g. this libcurl one. This would really help with windows workflow which i've narrowed problems down to around 10 packages which i think the goodies will fix.

I had come across this link too which implied making environment variables but this didnt seem to do anything when on our windows server : https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/contrib/ThirdPartySoftware.html

[jeroen]

Why don't you just install the precompiled binary packages for CRAN? See the zip files on the package homepage. These packages can be installed without the need for a compiler or connection.

[adamrobinson361]

@jeroen - it's part of a dependency managed workflow for a number of projects using packrat. Currently windows based analysts struggle to collaborate due to dependency mismatch and inability to restore previous versions from source.

Ability to compile these 10 or so packages would pretty much complete out workflow and combined with packrats cache feature would be perfect. All the packages we use are from cran and i assume have been through the win builder so i would hope that we could configure our servers similarly.