Issue in installation of mxnet package in R

Question

mxnet package is not installing in r (on windows 10) when I follow the steps given in its documentation.

install.packages("drat", repos="https://cran.rstudio.com")
drat:::addRepo("dmlc")
install.packages("mxnet")

It gives the following result

Installing package into ‘C:/Users/Ashish/Documents/R/win-library/3.3’ (as ‘lib’ is unspecified) Warning in install.packages : cannot open URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.3/PACKAGES.gz': HTTP status was '404 Not Found' Warning in install.packages : cannot open URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.3/PACKAGES': HTTP status was '404 Not Found' Warning in install.packages : unable to access index for repository http://dmlc.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.3: cannot open URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/bin/windows/contrib/3.3/PACKAGES' Package which is only available in source form, and may need compilation of C/C++/Fortran: ‘mxnet’ Do you want to attempt to install these from sources? y/n: y installing the source package ‘mxnet’

trying URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/src/contrib/mxnet_0.5.tar.gz' Warning in install.packages : cannot open URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/src/contrib/mxnet_0.5.tar.gz': HTTP status was '404 Not Found' Error in download.file(url, destfile, method, mode = "wb", ...) : cannot open URL 'http://dmlc.github.io/drat/src/contrib/mxnet_0.5.tar.gz' Warning in install.packages : download of package ‘mxnet’ failed

Kindly help me resolve this issue. I'm using R version 3.3.0. Is there any other way of installing it in R?

Answer 1

I was able to install it successfully by first downloading its zip file from the following link

https://github.com/dmlc/drat/tree/gh-pages/bin/windows/contrib/3.2

and then installing it using RStudio.

I hope this answer will help anyone else facing the same problem.

Answer 2

The more up-to-date Installation Guide is currently located here: http://mxnet.io/get_started/setup.html#installing-mxnet

I found the paragraph about the installation of the R-package on Windows to be very well written.

By the way, the install.packages("mxnet") command installs a very long tool chain, so it might happen that a package is currently not indexed correctly in the dmlc-repo (i.e. because it was just updated to a newer version on CRAN): Error: package <pkgname> is not available for R version 3.3.1 So you might want to install the "offending" package from the CRAN (or download the sourcecode and use something like install.packages(file.choose(), repos = NULL, type = "source")), then continue with another call to install.packages("mxnet").

Answer 3

The only thing that worked for me was to download the mxnet.zip file to a folder, (set it as working directory) and type:

install.packages("mxnet.zip", repos=NULL, type="win.binary")

Answer 4

You can try using different repo in repos.

Otherwise you can download the drat package along with dependencies and install manually.

Check if these URLs are accessible from your machine or not.

Following links will be helpful for you:
http://mxnet-bing.readthedocs.io/en/latest/build.html#r-package-installation https://github.com/dmlc/mxnet/issues/1085

Answer 5

I had the same issue and was able to resolve it by following the instructions on this page and choosing the correct OS, Language and CPU/GPU options: http://mxnet.io/get_started/install.html

Answer 6

try these commands to install mxnet package:--

cran <- getOption("repos")
cran["dmlc"] <- "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/apache-mxnet/R/CRAN/"
options(repos = cran)
install.packages("mxnet")