PDF builds now failing on Travis CI

[jtbayly]

I've had books building just fine on Travis CI, but now PDF builds are failing.

After this command:

/usr/bin/pandoc +RTS -K512m -RTS Ryle-Duties_of_Parents.utf8.md --to latex --from markdown+autolink_bare_uris+tex_math_single_backslash --output Ryle-Duties_of_Parents.tex --lua-filter /home/travis/R/Library/bookdown/rmarkdown/lua/custom-environment.lua --lua-filter /home/travis/R/Library/rmarkdown/rmarkdown/lua/pagebreak.lua --lua-filter /home/travis/R/Library/rmarkdown/rmarkdown/lua/latex-div.lua --metadata-file /tmp/RtmpLct6D7/file38194b188a34 --self-contained --table-of-contents --toc-depth 3 --number-sections --highlight-style tango --pdf-engine xelatex --natbib --include-in-header classics-template-files/latex/preamble.tex --include-before-body classics-template-files/latex/before_body.tex --variable graphics --wrap preserve --variable tables=yes --standalone -Mhas-frontmatter=false

I get the following:

No connection to the internet.

1065Unable to download the checksum of the remote TeX Live database,

1066but found a local copy so using that.

1067

1068You may want to try specifying an explicit or different CTAN mirror;

1069see the information and examples for the -repository option at

1070http://tug.org/texlive/doc/install-tl.html

1071(or in the output of install-tl --help).

1072

1073tlmgr: package repository http://ftp.math.purdue.edu/mirrors/ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet (not verified: unknown)

1074[1/1, ??:??/??:??] install: unicode-math [40k]

1075TLPDB::_install_package: downloading did not succeed

1076tlmgr: package log updated: /home/travis/texlive/texmf-var/web2c/tlmgr.log

1077tlmgr update --self

1078No connection to the internet.

1079

Does anybody know why this would have started happening, or how I can fix it? Obviously there is an internet connection, and it's working for everything else. However, that Purdue ctan url does seem to be down. Is that the problem? If so, how would I go about fixing this in bookdown on Travis?

[jtbayly]

I found that I can fix the problem by adding the following line to the _build.sh file:

tlmgr option repository ctan

This tells tlmgr to use an automatic CTAN mirror, whereas before it was apparently hardcoded to a particular repository at Purdue that is simply not online anymore.

It has to be inserted in the file prior to this line, where the PDF is generated:

Rscript -e "bookdown::render_book('index.Rmd', 'bookdown::pdf_book')"

Also, I suspect that this might only be a problem when you switch to xelatex for the latex engine.