Error installing mysql2: Failed to build gem native extension

Question

I am having some problems when trying to install mysql2 gem for Rails. When I try to install it by running bundle install or gem install mysq

Answer 1

In my case this helped:

$ export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib"
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"

Then:

gem install mysql2 -v '0.5.2' --source 'https://rubygems.org/' -- --with-cppflags=-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include --with-ldflags=-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib

Result:

Building native extensions with: '--with-cppflags=-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include --with-ldflags=-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib'
This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql2-0.5.2
Parsing documentation for mysql2-0.5.2
Installing ri documentation for mysql2-0.5.2
Done installing documentation for mysql2 after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

See this post (WARNING: Japanese language inside).

Answer 2

I had this issue on Windows 7. This is apparently an incompatibility issue and the solution is as follows:

Download the libmySQL.dll file from an older InstantRails installer. It is available from the InstantRails GitHub repo.

Next, copy that file into your Ruby/bin folder.

Now, you are good to go ;)

Answer 3

I'm on a mac and use homebrew to install open source programs. I did have to install mac Dev tools in order to install homebrew, but after that it was a simple:

brew install mysql

to install mysql. I haven't had a mysql gem problem since.

Answer 4

I was running into this error on my mac and found that I needed to upgrade from mysql 32bit to mysql 64 bit to get this error to go away. I was running OSX 10.6 on an intel macbook pro with ruby 1.9.2 and rails3.0.0

I also needed to install xcode in order to get unix utilities like "make" that are required to compile the gem.

once this was done I was able to run gem install mysql and gem install mysql2 without error.

Answer 5

On Ubuntu/Debian and other distributions using aptitude:

sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev

Package libmysql-ruby has been phased out and replaced by ruby-mysql. This is where I found the solution.

If the above command doesn't work because libmysql-ruby cannot be found, the following should be sufficient:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

On Red Hat/CentOS and other distributions using yum:

sudo yum install mysql-devel

On Mac OS X with Homebrew:

brew install mysql

Answer 6

I got this error too. Solved by installing development packages. I'm using arch and it was:

sudo pacman -S base-devel

which installed:

m4, autoconf, automake, bison, fakeroot, flex, libmpc, ppl, cloog-ppl, elfutils, gcc,
libtool, make, patch, pkg-config

but I think it actually needed make and gcc. Error output said (on my machine, among other):

"You have to install development tools first."

So it was an obvious decision and it helped.