Building environment.yml repo spuriously succeeds

[ElDeveloper]

I'm trying to build a binder for https://github.com/ElDeveloper/dogs and everything seems to be working just fine, the image is built and I can access the server. However, when I go there some of the dependencies are missing. After looking at the log file, it seems like R is missing from the build and one of my pip dependencies fail, thus leading to all the dependencies listed under pip to not be installed:

  Downloading qiime-default-reference-0.1.2.tar.gz (35.2MB)
Collecting qtconsole==4.2.1
  Downloading qtconsole-4.2.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (104kB)
Collecting requests==2.7.0
  Downloading requests-2.7.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (470kB)
Collecting rpy2==2.7.4
  Downloading rpy2-2.7.4.tar.gz (177kB)
    Error: Tried to guess R's HOME but no command (R) in the PATH.    
    ----------------------------------------

    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
�[91mCommand "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-BONcAQ/rpy2/�[0m

See the log file here.