Installing RGLPK in an AWS EC2 Instance with R Studio Server

Introduction

As a data analyst or scientist, you likely rely on various packages and libraries to perform your daily tasks. One such package that has proven to be quite useful is RGLPK, a package for solving linear programming problems. In this article, we’ll walk through the process of installing RGLPK in an AWS EC2 instance with R Studio Server.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following:

An AWS account and an EC2 instance set up with R Studio Server installed.
Basic knowledge of Linux commands and package installation.

Understanding the Error Message

The error message you’ll encounter when trying to install RGLPK is similar to this:

> install.packages("Rglpk")
Installing package into ‘/home/rstudio/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.0’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
trying URL 'https://cran.rstudio.com/src/contrib/Rglpk_0.6-4.tar.gz'
Content type ‘application/x-gzip’ length 21753 bytes (21 KB)
==================================================
downloaded 21 KB

* installing *source* package ‘Rglpk’ ...
** package ‘Rglpk’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
** using staged installation
** libs
/bin/bash: line 0: cd: GLPK: No such file or directory
Makevars:10: recipe for target 'GLPK.ts' failed
make: *** [GLPK.ts] Error 1
ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘Rglpk’
* removing ‘/home/rstudio/R/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-library/4.0/Rglpk’
Warning in install.packages :
  installation of package ‘Rglpk’ had non-zero exit status

The downloaded source packages are in
    ‘/tmp/RtmpHmQk09/downloaded_packages’

This error message indicates that the installation process encountered a problem with the GLPK library, which is required for RGLPK.

Installing GLPK on Your EC2 Instance

To resolve this issue, you’ll need to install the GLPK library on your EC2 instance. You can do this using the following command:

sudo apt install libglpk-dev

This command will download and install the GLPK library, which should fix the error message.

Installing RGLPK

After installing GLPK, you can now try to install RGLPK again using the following command:

install.packages("Rglpk")

This command will download and install RGLPK on your EC2 instance.

Conclusion

Installing RGLPK in an AWS EC2 instance with R Studio Server requires a few extra steps, but it’s definitely doable. By installing GLPK first, you should be able to resolve the error message and successfully install RGLPK. If you encounter any further issues, feel free to ask!

Additional Troubleshooting Steps

If you’re still having trouble installing RGLPK after following these steps, here are a few additional troubleshooting steps you can try:

Check that your GLPK library is installed by running the command sudo dpkg -L libglpk-dev.
Verify that your R Studio Server installation is up-to-date by checking for updates using sudo apt update and sudo apt full-upgrade.
Try installing RGLPK from source by downloading the source code from CRAN and compiling it manually.
Check that your environment variables are set correctly to point to the GLPK library.

Working with GLPK

If you need to use GLPK for other purposes, here’s a brief overview of how to work with it:

Checking if GLPK is installed: You can check if GLPK is installed by running sudo dpkg -L libglpk-dev.
Using GLPK from R: To use GLPK from within R, you’ll need to install the RGLPK package and load the library using library(RGLPK).
Compiling GLPK from source: If you want to compile GLPK from source, you can download the source code from CRAN and follow the instructions in the INSTALL.R file.

Conclusion

In this article, we walked through the process of installing RGLPK in an AWS EC2 instance with R Studio Server. We also covered some additional troubleshooting steps you can take if you encounter any issues during installation. By following these steps, you should be able to successfully install and use RGLPK on your EC2 instance.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Here are some common issues that users may experience when installing RGLPK:

Error: cannot open package file: If you receive an error message indicating that the package file cannot be opened, it’s likely due to a permissions issue. Try running the command with elevated privileges using sudo.
Error: GLPK not installed: If you encounter an error message indicating that GLPK is not installed, try installing it using the command sudo apt install libglpk-dev.
Error: RGLPK cannot be found: If you receive an error message indicating that RGLPK cannot be found, try loading the library manually using library(RGLPK).

Working with Other Linear Programming Libraries

If you’re interested in working with other linear programming libraries, here are some popular alternatives:

GLPK: GLPK is a powerful and widely-used linear programming library that provides a robust API for solving linear programming problems.
CPLEX: CPLEX is a commercial linear programming solver that offers advanced features such as branch-and-bound and cutting plane methods.
CVXPY: CVXPY is an open-source Python library for convex optimization that includes support for linear programming.

By working with these libraries, you can expand your toolkit for solving linear programming problems and tackle more complex projects.

Last modified on 2024-02-29