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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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 9:12 GMT and is filed under Development, Ruby, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.