Installing PG gem on OS X - failure to build native extension

ruby-on-rails macos postgresql gem
Mel picture Mel · Oct 9, 2013 · Viewed 108.6k times · Source

It seems many others have had problems installing the pg gem. None of the solutions posed for others have worked for me.

I have tried to install the pg gem and postgres.app. The pg gem won't install. The first error I get is:

An error occurred while installing pg (0.17.0), and Bundler cannot continue. Make sure that gem install pg -v '0.17.0' succeeds before bundling.

The installation advice about pointing my gem install to the config for pg fails with the following error message (which many others on this forum have encountered):

Failed to build native extensions... Results logged to /Users/melanie/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p448/gems/pg-0.17.0/ext/gem_make.out

I don't know how to find or access this log file to search for further clues.

I also get an error message (command not found) when I try using the sudo apt-get install command. I've scoured this forum for the last 6 hours, trying each piece of advice to get pg working with my rails project.

I can't find advice about how to change a path, or specifically, what change is required. My which pg_config returns a file source. I've used that with a command to install pg using that config. It fails.

There are so many people that have had trouble with this. Many answers suggest homebrew. I've had to remove that because it threw up other issues.

Answer

shicholas picture shicholas · Oct 27, 2013

Same error for me and I didn't experience it until I downloaded OS X 10.9 (Mavericks). Sigh, another OS upgrade headache.

Here's how I fixed it (with homebrew):

  • Install another build of Xcode Tools (typing brew update in the terminal will prompt you to update the Xcode build tools)
  • brew update
  • brew install postgresql

After that gem install pg worked for me.

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