Install hpricot on Mac OS X with rvm and brew

Question

Having problems installing hpricot on Mac OS X. I suspect it might be an issue between rvm and brew?

rvm 1.0.5 brew 0.7

Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks!

$ gem install hpricot
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing hpricot:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/Users/dhaskin/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p302/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for stdio.h... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
    --with-opt-dir
    --without-opt-dir
    --with-opt-include
    --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
    --with-opt-lib
    --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
    --with-make-prog
    --without-make-prog
    --srcdir=.
    --curdir
    --ruby=/Users/dhaskin/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p302/bin/ruby


Gem files will remain installed in /Users/dhaskin/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302/gems/hpricot-0.8.2 for inspection.
Results logged to /Users/dhaskin/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p302/gems/hpricot-0.8.2/ext/fast_xs/gem_make.out

Answer 1

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. and checking for stdio.h... no are suspicious. Hpricot, along with many other Ruby gems, needs to compile some code and will fail if the development package is missing.

You are running RVM and 1.8.7 is in ~/.rvm on your machine, so it looks like it is because RVM would have to compile Ruby, but the failure sounds like it isn't. Do you have Apple's XCode installed in the /Developer directory? If you didn't install it and/or the directory isn't there, you can find the installer on your MacOS install discs, or at Apple's Developer site: http://developer.apple.com/technologies/xcode.html

That aside, I'd recommend using Nokogiri over Hpricot. I ran into several bugs in Hpricot a while back that made it unusable for my needs, and switched to Nokogiri. You'll find the two gems have similar syntax. http://nokogiri.org/

Answer 2

Turns out this was an XCode version dependency. Updating XCode to 3.2.4 resolved this.