my company has hosted a private GitLab server, which I'm accessing via VPN from my laptop.

I am currently working on some technical reports (repository 1) using RMarkdown and decided to create a template package for my RMarkdown HTML template files in a separate, private repository (repository 2).

My goal is to install the package from repository 2 from within the project of repository 1 in RStudio. I tried using remotes::install_gitlab for this purpose, however I get an error message, I do not really understand. My guess is, that this is mostly, because it's the first time I got in touch with GitLab, so maybe there is a very obvious solution - I simply couldn't find it yet.

What I'm trying to do

remotes::install_gitlab(repo = "USERNAME/REPOSITORY", host = "https://HOST_IP") 

#> Error: Failed to install 'unknown package' from GitLab:
#>   cannot open URL 'https://HOST_IP/api/v4/projects/USERNAME%2FREPOSITORY/repository/files/DESCRIPTION/raw?ref=HEAD'

First of all, the URL remotes is trying to open really does not exist, but I can access the repo via https://HOST_IP/USERNAME/REPOSITORY without any problems. I understand, that it tries to use GitLab's API to install the repository, however I don't understand what's going wrong here. Is there a problem with my authentication? Do I need to create some kind of access token I'm not aware of?

Thank you all for your input!