Issue with fishbase and/or rfishbase

Hi,

I am using rfishbase for the first time and when I try to access something as simple as the morphology for the first species, e.g. morphology(species_list()[1]), I get an error message stating:

Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) : Problem with the SSL CA cert (path? access rights?)

A coworker has attempted the same thing and receives an “Error 400: bad request” message.

I am unsure of whether this is a current issue with fishbase or rfishbase (or curl), or if the problem is simply on our end. I’d be grateful for any help concerning this, thanks!

Hi, And thanks for your question.

What version of rfishbase are you using? Our bad, but we haven’t pushed a new version to CRAN in a while. If you are on a CRAN version, install from GitHub like devtools::install_github("ropensci/rfishbase") - Then that should work for you. If you don’t have the devtools package install that first from CRAN install.packages("devtools")

Thanks for the quick response!

I’m using version 2.1.0. I tried your suggestion, but unfortunately even just running devtools::install_github(“ropensci/rfishbase”) resulted in the exact same message of:
Error in curl::curl_fetch_memory(url, handle = handle) : Problem with the SSL CA cert (path? access rights?)

As I understand it, the first time you use species_list() it gets that data from fishbase, and when I try that it worked perfectly fine. So it doesn’t seem to be rejecting every request; not sure what that means though.

That sounds like a problem on your end.

Does devtools::has_devel() return a TRUE value?

p.s. species_list() function calls from a cached version of the species list, so it shouldn’t make an HTTP request that would cause a similar error unless you change some settings

Can you send us output of sessionInfo()?

Do you know if you can access other HTTPS sites from R / httr::GET ?

Maybe the same issue as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35055715/ssl-connect-error-in-httr-curl ?