SSL certificate problem when publishing to RPubs

When trying to publish a document to RPubs from RStudio Desktop, RStudio Workbench (previously RStudio Server Pro), or RStudio Server Open Source, you may see an error like the following:

Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE) : 
SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate
Calls: rpubsUpload ... <Anonymous> -> .postForm -> .Call -> <Anonymous> -> fun
Execution halted

Typically this indicates that there is something going on with SSL certificates, your network/proxy configuration, and trying to use Curl. In this case you need to set your RPubs upload method to make sure the process uses a plain socket connection rather than Curl. You can do this by editing your .Rprofile (you can easily access your .Rprofile by running the command file.edit('~/.Rprofile') within RStudio) and inserting the following code:

options(rpubs.upload.method = "internal")

and then restart R by going to Session > Restart R for the changes to take effect.

Note that there is a possibility this may also fail if you are inside a network with proxies. If this happens, then you’ll need to make sure that R and RCurl can make connections outside the network.

For configuring R to run with proxies, see our article here.

For configuring and troubleshooting RCurl, see the RCurl FAQ here.

If you're still seeing errors, try updating to the latest version of the RStudio IDE and see if that fixes the issue.

Let us know on our support forums if you have any issues or questions about this.