Error while building R package on Travis CI" "tlmgr update --self" failed

Question

I was building an R package on https://travis-ci.org/ and got an error:

    The command "tlmgr update --self" failed and exited with 25 during .

The last lines of Travis CI output:

When I call devtools::check() locally on Windows 10 in RStudio no errors nor warnings arise.

I found that tlmgr concerns with LaTeX/TexLive packages, and In Travis CI documentation "Building an R Project" it's written that some LaTeX/TexLive may be need to be installed if vignettes require. (Note: there are no vignettes in my package yet.)

Configuration in .travis.yml file:

language: R
sudo: false
cache: packages
r_github_packages:
  - jimhester/covr
after_success:
  - Rscript -e 'covr::codecov()'

My question: what is the cause of the problem and how to solve it?

Electromechanical

I've posted an issue at github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/6139 – Carruthers

Yep, I also just had the same problem. – Hebdomadal

me 3 - thanks for posting this – Kif

The problem's been fixed: github.com/travis-ci/travis-build/pull/743, now we just need to wait until the pull request is accepted. – Ambassadoratlarge

I just ran into the same problem. Glad to hear a fix is on the way! So grateful for stackoverflow. – Sisal

Answer 1

It seems that tlmgr can't accessing the current repository, you can rollback the repository to the archived version with:

tlmgr option repository ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2015/tlnet-final

which gaves

tlmgr: setting default package repository to ftp://tug.org/historic/systems/texlive/2015/tlnet-final

Source: A little trick with tlmgr: Unknown directive …containerchecksum error

Torose