[R] Password protected R Repository

[Stefan Petersson]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley <at> stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> 
> Who said that RCurl::getURL worked with install.packages?
> (At least, I assume this is from RCurl: you did not mention it.)
> 
> install.packages() first calls available.packages(), and that uses 
> download.file to get the PACKAGES[.gz] file.  It then calls 
> download.file to get the packages.
> 
> So please read the help for download.file (as the help pages say), and 
> try the solutions described there.
> 
> On Wed, 28 Sep 2011, Stefan Petersson wrote:
> 

The helpfiles for 'download.file' was not that helpful. But maybe it's just me 
not being able to read them correctly. 

I tried to call install.packages with the 'method=wget', and hoped for a 
username and password dialog. But no luck. Other than that, I see no arguments 
that relates to my problem under ?download.file. Which btw is 'installing an R 
library from a password protected URL (Apache Basic Authentication)'.

Actually, nobody said that RCurl::getURL would work with install.packages, but 
from what was written in a post somewhere I jumped to the (false) conclusion 
that it would work. That's why I tried it.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated!