With the joys of ruby 1.8.7 on OS X 10.7.3, i had to include a manual build step to get get mysql to build. This was the error i was seeing:

Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lm… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lz… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lsocket… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lnsl… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lmygcc… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… 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.

The solution was to manually install the gem that had been stored in the temporary directory:

cd~/.bundler/tmp/85326/gems/mysql-2.8.1/

sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

Once done, bundle install worked and used the installed gem

I’m starting to use rvm with my rails projects and am wondering how to be use it in conjunction with bundler, as bundler already does a good job of managing the gems i need in my project.

To keep things simple for now, i’ve decided to keep bundler doing what it’s been doing (managing the project gems), and use rvm to simply specify the versions of ruby and bundler to use within the project.

So, in my project folder, i have 2 files, 1 for rvm and 1 for bundler:

• .rvmrc
  This includes only the following:
  rvm use 1.9.2@development –create
  
• Gemfile
  Includes all gems need within the project

The @development specifies that the app is using this rvm gemset, meaning that if i wish, i could have multiple gemsets and switch between them. As i’m currently handing off most of the gem management responsibility to bundler, this doesn’t makes sense at the moment, but could be useful later as i possibly migrate further responsibility over to rvm over time.