Installing additional packages fails

[verdurin]

Hello

Thanks for making this available - it's very useful.

However, I'm having trouble installing additional packages, with the following simple playbook:

---
- hosts: all
  sudo: true
  remote_user: centos
  vars:
    r_install_dev: True
    r_install: ['r-recommended']
    r_packages: ['dplyr']
  roles:
    - ansible-r

This is the error I see:

TASK: [ansible-r | packages | install] ****************************************
fatal: [frontend001] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute002] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute001] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute003] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute005] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute006] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute004] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute007] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute008] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute011] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute010] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute012] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute013] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute014] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute015] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute016] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute009] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute017] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute018] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'
fatal: [compute019] => One or more undefined variables: 'unicode object' has no attribute 'name'

FATAL: all hosts have already failed -- aborting

I tried adding the packages into the 'r_install' variable, but they didn't work there either:

---
- hosts: all
  sudo: true
  remote_user: centos
  vars:
    r_install_dev: True
    r_install: ['r-recommended', 'dplyr']
  roles:
    - ansible-r

producing the error:

failed: [compute019] => (item=r-recommended,dplyr) => {"failed": true, "item": "r-recommended,dplyr"}
msg: No package matching 'dplyr' is available

[tersmitten]

r_packages is a list of dictionaries, see this file:

The playbook below will probably fix your problems (not tested):

- hosts: localhost
  remote_user: root
  roles:
    - ansible-r
  vars:
    r_install_dev: true
    # apt packages
    r_install:
      - r-recommended
    # cran-r packages
    r_packages:
      - name: dplyr

[verdurin]

Yes, something like that works. The README should probably be expanded to include this clarification, which wasn't apparent to me, at least. In other words, it wasn't clear that r_install is for DEBs and r_packages is for R packages.

Thanks.