How to Install R's devtools and digitize?

httr imports the openssl package which needs as system requirement libssl-dev (sudo apt install libssl-dev)

------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------
Configuration failed because openssl was not found. Try installing:
 * deb: libssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
...

The curl package needs as system requirement libcurl4-openssl-dev:

------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------
Configuration failed because libcurl was not found. Try installing:
 * deb: libcurl4-openssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
...

So, to install you will need to run:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

Then start an R shell with sudo R and:

install.packages('httr')
install.packages('git2r')
install.packages('devtools')
library(devtools)
install_github('tpoisot/digitize')

As a general rule, you don't just change the permissions of system directories! That's what root access is for. Put the permissions back the way you found them and next time run sudo R and install.packages from the resulting, root R shell.

Now, the reason you can't install is right there in the output you show:

ERROR: dependencies ‘httr’, ‘git2r’ are not available for package ‘devtools’

Apparently, as explained by rcs, on Ubuntu, you need to install libssl-dev and libcurl4-openssl-dev first.

---

The next issue is that your root user's R installation has /usr/local/lib/R/site-library as the first directory in the output of .libPaths and that is not in the paths of your regular user. Since it is the first entry for root, that's where your library was installed:

 Installing package into ‘/usr/local/lib/R/site-library’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)

So, a simple solution is to create a file called ~/.Rprofile and add this line to it:

.libPaths("/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/")

Alternatively, or additionally, you could include a line like

   .libPaths("/home/masi/Rlibs")

That would let you install libraries into the directory /home/masi/Rlibs (chose whatever name you want) in future and so avoid the need for sudo R.

---

Alternatively, you could set the environmental variable R_LIBS_USER to /usr/local/lib/R/site-library/ (or /home/masi/Rlibs or wherever else your libraries are being installed). Just add this line to your ~/.profile:

R_LIBS_USER=/usr/local/lib/R/site-library/