How I Fix the Error Installing Tidyverse on Linux (Debian)

When I first set up R on a fresh Debian linux box, I thought everything would be smooth sailing. But the moment I tried to install tidyverse, I hit a wall.

install.packages("tidyverse")

Instead of installing cleanly, my terminal lit up with a long error log. The important parts looked like this:

Using PKG_LIBS=-lfreetype -lpng16 -ltiff -lz -ljpeg -lbz2
Configuration failed to find one of freetype2 libpng libtiff-4 libjpeg...
<stdin>:1:10: fatal error: ft2build.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.

ERROR: configuration failed for package ‘ragg’
ERROR: dependency ‘ragg’ is not available for package ‘tidyverse’
ERROR: dependency ‘xml2’ had non-zero exit status

At first, I thought maybe my R setup was broken. But digging into it, I realized the issue was not with R—it was with my system dependencies.

What the Error Actually

• ft2build.h: No such file or directory → This means the compiler couldn’t find FreeType headers. On Debian, they live in /usr/include/freetype2/.
• ragg failed → The ragg package is responsible for high-quality graphics output in R. It depends on FreeType, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, zlib, bzip2, and font libraries. Missing any of these breaks the installation.
• xml2 failed → This needs the development headers for libxml2 (libxml2-dev).

In short: I didn’t just need R. I needed linux dev packages (headers and build tools) so R could compile its dependencies.

The Fix Installing All Required System Libraries

Here’s what I ran on my Debian system:

sudo apt update

# Core build tools
sudo apt install -y build-essential r-base-dev pkg-config

# Graphics + text stack (needed by ragg and friends)
sudo apt install -y \
  libfreetype6-dev libpng-dev libtiff5-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev \
  libharfbuzz-dev libfribidi-dev libfontconfig1-dev libcairo2-dev libpango1.0-dev

# Common tidyverse dependencies
sudo apt install -y \
  libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libicu-dev

After this, R finally had everything it needed to compile tidyverse packages.

Tip: If you’re on a minimal VM or Docker container, almost none of these will be installed by default.

Reinstalling Tidyverse

With dependencies installed, I went back to R:

options(Ncpus = parallel::detectCores())  # faster builds
install.packages(c("ragg", "xml2"))       # build problem packages first
install.packages("tidyverse")

This time, no errors.

Practice Verifying My Setup

I didn’t stop at “it installs.” I wanted to be sure my graphics stack, XML parsing, and tidyverse pipeline actually worked.

Test ragg + ggplot2

library(ggplot2)

agg_png("test_plot.png", width = 800, height = 500, res = 144)
ggplot(mtcars, aes(wt, mpg, color = factor(cyl))) +
  geom_point(size = 3) +
  labs(title = "Hello, ragg! ✓", color = "Cylinders")
dev.off()

If test_plot.png is crisp and colorful, then FreeType + PNG + Cairo stack is working.

Test xml2

library(xml2)

doc <- read_xml("<root><msg>hi</msg></root>")
xml_text(xml_find_first(doc, "//msg"))
# [1] "hi"

If you see "hi", then libxml2 headers are correctly in place.

Test tidyverse with Penguins

install.packages("palmerpenguins")
library(tidyverse)
library(palmerpenguins)

penguins |>
  drop_na(bill_length_mm, flipper_length_mm, species) |>
  group_by(species) |>
  summarise(
    n = n(),
    avg_bill = mean(bill_length_mm),
    avg_flipper = mean(flipper_length_mm),
    .groups = "drop"
  ) |>
  arrange(desc(n))

This gave me a neat grouped summary of penguin species data.

Final Thoughts

What I learned from this whole experience is that R itself isn’t the problem when packages fail it’s the missing system libraries that R relies on to compile everything properly. On Debian, the winning combination was simple: build-essential and r-base-dev for compilers, pkg-config for library discovery, image and font development libraries for ragg, plus libxml2-dev, libcurl4-openssl-dev, and libssl-dev for networking and parsing. Once I had those installed, tidyverse compiled without issues and my R setup was smooth again. So if you ever see that scary ft2build.h not found error, don’t panic just install the missing dev packages, retry, and confirm with a few test scripts.