Unable to install binary packages from packagemanager.rstudio.com on Linux

[argus]

I'm unable to get R to install binary packages from packagemanager.rstudio.com on a CentOS Linux server. R will always fetch the source and compile it instead of getting the binary when I try to install a package.

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. My company's security policy doesn't allow compilers on production servers, so I was hoping to get binary packages to install so I won't have to build and package them elsewhere.

I see someone else is having the same issue at Should I be able to install binary packages on fedora.

I'm testing on CentOS 7.8 with R 3.6.3. I installed R from source using the directions at https://docs.rstudio.com/resources/install-r-source/. Then I set up R to use binary packages as described at https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/client/#/repos/1/overview.

Contents of my .Rprofile:

options(repos = c(REPO_NAME = "https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/all/__linux__/centos7/latest"))

If I run a command such as install.packages("stringi"), it will download the source.

Here's some example output:

> install.packages("stringi")
trying URL 'https://packagemanager.rstudio.com/all/__linux__/centos7/latest/src/contrib/stringi_1.5.3.tar.gz'
Content type 'binary/octet-stream' length 7297484 bytes (7.0 MB)
==================================================
downloaded 7.0 MB

* installing *source* package ‘stringi’ ...
** package ‘stringi’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
checking for R_HOME... /opt/R/3.6.3/lib64/R
checking for R... /opt/R/3.6.3/lib64/R/bin/R
checking for endianness... little
checking for R >= 3.1.0 for C++11 use... yes
checking for R < 3.4.0 for CXX1X flag use... no
checking for cat... /bin/cat
checking for local ICUDT_DIR... icu61/data
checking for gcc... gcc -std=gnu99
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
 [SNIP]

I also appended the following two lines to my .Rprofile, but it didn't make a difference.

options(install.packages.check.source = "no")
options(install.packages.compile.from.source = "never")

I've only been using R for a few days, so feel free to explain like I'm five, or direct me to the docs if I've missed something simple.

[rstub]

One typical problem is the user agent header, which you can test with

source("https://docs.rstudio.com/rspm/admin/check-user-agent.R")

If this does not report success, you should follow the printed instructions to update your configuration. See https://docs.rstudio.com/rspm/admin/serving-binaries/#binary-user-agents for more details.

BTW, you can make your live easier by using our pre-compiled binaries.

[argus]

Thanks. That script told me to add options(HTTPUserAgent = sprintf("R/%s R (%s)", getRversion(), paste(getRversion(), R.version$platform, R.version$arch, R.version$os))) to my .Rprofile, and that fixed the problem.