Search code examples
rquantmod

download.file works only over https

I have a weird problem. I use quantmod package to get rates from "oanda" provider. It internally uses the download.file function, that fails with a message

cannot open URL 'http://www.oanda.com/.....'

I was able to narrow the problem to:

> download.file("https://oanda.com", destfile="/tmp/gh")
trying URL 'https://oanda.com'
downloaded 95 KB

> download.file("http://oanda.com", destfile="/tmp/gh")
trying URL 'http://oanda.com'
Error in download.file("http://oanda.com", destfile = "/tmp/gh") : 
  cannot open URL 'http://oanda.com'

Note the difference in http/https above.

This is reproducible for any other domain. I am completely lost since I can’t google any trace of this to happen to anybody else. wget from the command line works perfectly for both addresses.

Probably unrelated environment details: I have RCurl installed. It’s being run from under local shiny server installed on AWS. Ubuntu 14LTS.

So, how can I make quantmod to use https for it’s call or how can I make download.file to work with http?

Solution

  • I'm posting my comment above as answer.

    Please refer to this bug report : http://github.com/joshuaulrich/quantmod/issues/83

    It seems there is an issue with curl.

    If wget is working fine, you can follow the same advice and try the R command options(download.file.method="wget") to make quantmod download using wget instead of curl.