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Installing Achilles on Windows Desktops

Greetings Colleagues,

I’ve put together some documentation on how to install Achilles on a Windows desktop. I’d appreciate feedback and would like to donate the content to the community if found useful for future use.

Google Doc Link

One thing to note: The Achilles Github README says to install Achilles by using the command ’
devtools:: install_github(“OHDSI/Achilles”)’. That did not work for me unfortunately. My work around was to download the source to the desktop.

Hope this helps someone!

Great resource, it is indeed not straightforward to install Achilles, especially its dependencies. You could raise a Github issue to add parts of this description to the Achilles wiki for reusability within the community.

Btw; what error message did you get when you executed devtools::install_github("OHDSI/Achilles")? It still works for me (just updated to v1.6.3).

Ah, there’s a typo in the README file, a space between the devtools:: and the install_github. I’ve fixed it in my new pull request. Thanks @jmwarfe!

Nice guide @jmwarfe. I added a few comments to clarify that this is for Windows/SQL Server specifically, and that you don’t need both the github and the local install commands, just 1 or the other.

Regarding TLS, is that step for Windows authentication? If so, an alternate method is to just place the sqlauth.dll file that comes with the SQL Server JDBC driver into your system path and restart R.

Thanks @Ajit_Londhe for providing feedback. I’ll add a background section that clarifies that this was written for Windows/SQL Server but could be adopted to other RDBMS. I also changed the documentation to install from Github instead of local file.

Regarding TLS - By default Windows 7 uses TLS 1.1 instead of 1.2 to communicate to HTTPS web servers. This is no longer supported by GitHub and CRAN as the protocol is deprecated. Hence 1.2 has to be enabled for downloads to work.

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