diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.yml b/.gitlab-ci.yml
index 2a96a107b8e98caae48f00066a30d8e392e1fec6..3f50e90238f1e8a15615d62d5777bc62ae0695e6 100644
--- a/.gitlab-ci.yml
+++ b/.gitlab-ci.yml
@@ -1,13 +1,13 @@
 variables:
   _R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_: "true"
   _R_CHECK_FORCE_SUGGESTS_: "true"
-  APT_PKGS: c("libcurl4-openssl-dev", "libxext-dev")
+  APT_PKGS: "libcurl4-openssl-dev" "libxext-dev"
 
 image: rocker/tidyverse
 
 before_script:
   - apt-get update
-  - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends ${APT_PKGS}
+  - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends ${cat APT_PKGS}
   - apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends qpdf pandoc pandoc-citeproc
   - R -e 'install.packages(c("testthat", "rmarkdown"));'
   - R -e "install.packages(c('parallel', 'data.table', 'ggplot2', 'gridExtra', 'glmmTMB', 'magrittr', 'MASS', 'reshape2', 'rlang', 'stats', 'utils', 'BiocManager', 'car'))"