Installing Ruby gems that require building native extensions on Snow Leopard

December 18th, 2009 by e-thang Leave a reply »

I haven’t tested this on all “machines” running Snow Leopard, but on the brand new one I had to get today for work, I found that the default Ruby / Gems install doesn’t support installing gems that require building native extensions. The error message I was treated to contained the following:

MacBook-Pro-de-Ethan-Garofolo:~ juanpaco$ sudo gem install thin
Password:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing thin:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install thin
mkmf.rb can't find header files for ruby at /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/ruby.h


Gem files will remain installed in /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10 for inspection.
Results logged to /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/eventmachine-0.12.10/ext/gem_make.out

The solution was hyper-intuitive. Install XCode. Because of course that's the first thing you think of.

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2 comments

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  1. Trevor Harmon says:
    August 7, 2010 at 6:51 pm

    I have the had the same problem – I installed XCode yesterday, but still am facing this issue. When you installed XCode, did you need to do anything to get it working?

  2. e-thang says:
    August 7, 2010 at 8:07 pm

    Dang, sorry. No I didn’t. After installing XCode it all just started working.

    Does the error message change for you at all?

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