Unable To Install Tidyverse Due To Libcurl Issue - r

Question

I recently upgraded to R 3.5 and have been unable to install the 'tidyverse' package. Other packages are installing fine. Whenever I try to install tidyverse, I receive the following error message.
* installing *source* package ‘curl’ ...
** package ‘curl’ successfully unpacked and MD5 sums checked
Found pkg-config cflags and libs!
Using PKG_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu
Using PKG_LIBS=-lcurl
------------------------- ANTICONF ERROR ---------------------------
Configuration failed because libcurl was not found. Try installing:
* deb: libcurl4-openssl-dev (Debian, Ubuntu, etc)
* rpm: libcurl-devel (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)
* csw: libcurl_dev (Solaris)
If libcurl is already installed, check that 'pkg-config' is in your
PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH contains a libcurl.pc file. If pkg-config
is unavailable you can set INCLUDE_DIR and LIB_DIR manually via:
R CMD INSTALL --configure-vars='INCLUDE_DIR=... LIB_DIR=...'
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘curl’
* removing ‘/home/nik/anaconda3/lib/R/library/curl’
ERROR: dependency ‘curl’ is not available for package ‘httr’
* removing ‘/home/nik/anaconda3/lib/R/library/httr’
ERROR: dependency ‘httr’ is not available for package ‘rvest’
* removing ‘/home/nik/anaconda3/lib/R/library/rvest’
ERROR: dependencies ‘httr’, ‘rvest’ are not available for package ‘tidyverse’
* removing ‘/home/nik/anaconda3/lib/R/library/tidyverse’
The downloaded source packages are in
‘/tmp/RtmpHJ48Sk/downloaded_packages’
Updating HTML index of packages in '.Library'
Making 'packages.html' ... done
Warning messages:
1: In install.packages("tidyverse") :
installation of package ‘curl’ had non-zero exit status
2: In install.packages("tidyverse") :
installation of package ‘httr’ had non-zero exit status
3: In install.packages("tidyverse") :
installation of package ‘rvest’ had non-zero exit status
4: In install.packages("tidyverse") :
installation of package ‘tidyverse’ had non-zero exit status
I have run sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev as has been suggested on other threads for the same problem. However, this does not appear to resolve the issue (in fact, libcurl was already installed, and reinstalling it also did not work).
When I check $PATH, I do not see 'pkg-config', and PKG_CONFIG_PATH does not seem to exist. Adding /usr/bin/pkg-config to the path and setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH /home/nik/anaconda3/lib/pkgconfig/libcurl.pc also does not appear to have fixed the issue. I'm at wits end at this point, as I can't think of anything else to uninstall/reinstall, nor figure out why libcurl isn't being added to the path on its own when I install it. Any help at all would be appreciated.

Answer 1

try setting your path to the directory that contains libcurl and not to libcurl itself, i.e.
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/nik/anaconda3/lib/pkgconfig