Installing Hpricot from Ruby Gems errors out
on Tuesday 31st March, 2009 Gabe speculated thusly…I was recently trying to get a Ruby script working on Ubuntu. This script required Hpricot and using Ruby Gems to install Hpricot always resulted in an error:
gem install hpricot --remote
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
You don't have write permissions into the /var/lib/gems/1.8 directory.
gabriel@windsor-telecom-2874:~/Music$ sudo gem install hpricot --remote
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing hpricot:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install hpricot --remote
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1
Gem files will remain installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.7/ext/hpricot_scan/gem_make.out
The answer was simple:
sudo aptitude install ruby-dev
Just install the Ruby Dev package, this will also allow you to install lots of other gems such as SQLite3, etc.
Posted in Development, Ruby, Ubuntu