What could be issues for failing to build the teststan example package?

General
1

I am trying to develop a R package that makes use of rstan and started from the proposed skeleton etc (as per the steps in guidelines for rstan-based packages). I believe what does wrong is the Stan compilation part. After a while I started to wonder whether there is a problem with my computer/R/rstan/devtools/RStudio/something set-up and whether I should try a simple example project. I tried to download the project https://github.com/dmenne/teststan (version downloaded this morning) and to create a package from that in RStudio for Windows 10. This fails, too, with the message below.

Does anyone know, whether the example project should still work? Am I overlooking something really obvious? Have I somehow set things up incorrectly, failed to install something or anything like that?

==> Rcmd.exe INSTALL --no-multiarch --with-keep.source teststan-master

  • installing to library ‘C:/programs/R/R-3.4.0/library’
  • installing source package ‘teststan’ …
    ** libs
    no DLL was created
    ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘teststan’
  • removing ‘C:/programs/R/R-3.4.0/library/teststan’

Exited with status 1.

sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows >= 8 x64 (build 9200)

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C LC_TIME=English_United States.1252

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

other attached packages:
[1] rstantools_1.2.0 rstan_2.15.1 StanHeaders_2.15.0-1 ggplot2_2.2.1

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.11 grid_3.4.0 plyr_1.8.4 gtable_0.2.0 stats4_3.4.0 scales_0.4.1 rlang_0.1.1
[8] lazyeval_0.2.0 tools_3.4.0 munsell_0.4.3 compiler_3.4.0 inline_0.3.14 colorspace_1.3-2 gridExtra_2.2.1
[15] tibble_1.3.3

2

Try Rcmd.exe INSTALL --no-multiarch -with-keep.source --preclean teststan-master
Or do Rcmd.exe build first.

3

Thanks! Adding that one option did indeed result in things working fine for the teststan package.

Should this option always be used for Stan based packages?

4

It depends if you want to (re)build the C++ or keep the same C++ and build the package with possibly modified R code.