Build is failing at remotes::install_github()

[tombishop1]

The build fails because it can't download the file from Github using remotes::install_github(). I suspect this is related to r-lib/remotes#641. This is weird, because the URL opens fine in a browser etc.

Quitting from lines 15-52 (itraxBook.Rmd) 
Error: Error: Failed to install 'unknown package' from GitHub:
  cannot open URL 'https://api.github.com/repos/tombishop1/itraxR/contents/DESCRIPTION?ref=HEAD'

Faced with the same problem locally, I set options(download.file.method = "libcurl"), whereas before it was set to "wininet". However, when I later tried the same in a new session using the default values, it worked fine, so I suspect this may have been a red-herring (see below for the output of the local run).

> remotes::install_github("tombishop1/itraxR")
Downloading GitHub repo tombishop1/itraxR@HEAD
√  checking for file 'C:\Users\tombi\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpC8Uexh\remotes378c1ed41b25\tombishop1-itraxR-d0e0b78/DESCRIPTION' ... 
-  preparing 'itraxR': (401ms)
√  checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... 
-  checking for LF line-endings in source and make files and shell scripts
-  checking for empty or unneeded directories
-  building 'itraxR_1.4.tar.gz'
   
Installing package into ‘C:/Users/tombi/Documents/R/win-library/4.1’
(as ‘lib’ is unspecified)
* installing *source* package 'itraxR' ...
** using staged installation
** R
** data
*** moving datasets to lazyload DB
** inst
** byte-compile and prepare package for lazy loading
** help
*** installing help indices
  converting help for package 'itraxR'
    finding HTML links ... done
    CD166_19_S1                             html  
    itrax_correlation                       html  
    itrax_image                             html  
    itrax_import                            html  
    itrax_join                              html  
    itrax_meta                              html  
    itrax_ordination                        html  
    itrax_qspecsettings                     html  
    itrax_radiograph                        html  
    itrax_reduce                            html  
    itrax_restspectra                       html  
    itrax_section                           html  
    itrax_spectra                           html  
    multivariate_import                     html  
** building package indices
** testing if installed package can be loaded from temporary location
*** arch - i386
*** arch - x64
** testing if installed package can be loaded from final location
*** arch - i386
*** arch - x64
** testing if installed package keeps a record of temporary installation path
* DONE (itraxR)
> getOption("download.file.method")
[1] "wininet"

[tombishop1]

Thinking about this, I wonder if it has something to do with the changes in 4.1.1 - there are platform specific changes to methods for download.file. I think I can pass method = in remotes::install_github(), so the answer might be to define a method here. Perhaps options(download.file.method = "libcurl") or method = "curl" is appropriate for macOS?

[tombishop1]

OK, it was actually a PAT thing. Seems to be sorted now.