Why does installing Nokogiri on Mac OS fail with libiconv is missing?

I tried many things but nothing worked for me. Then I finally found the [iconv documentation][1] and it saved my day!

[1]:

[To see links please register here]

You need to upgrade your homebrew to 0.9

then follow these steps

brew install libxml2 libxslt
brew link libxml2 libxslt
wget

[To see links please register here]

tar xvfz libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz
cd libiconv-1.13.1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.13.1
make
sudo make install

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.2

gem install nokogiri -- --with-xml2-include=/usr/local/Cellar/libxml2/2.9.0/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/libxml2/2.9.0/lib --with-xslt-dir=/usr/local/Cellar/libxslt/1.1.28 --with-iconv-include=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.13.1/include --with-iconv-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.13.1/lib

You should double check the folder library version.

This [blog post](

[To see links please register here]

) proposes to install libiconv manually.

Subsequently, nokogiri can be installed with a number of switches telling it where to find libiconv (see the blog post).

As a side note: After installing nokogiri, I managed to install gollum (installation of which also failed because it could not find iconv). Now I am still facing problems though, because when I start up gollum, Python crashes.

$ gem install iconv # works but it is missing an iconv.so file in ruby 2.0.0-p247

$ ls -1 2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/*/*/*.so
2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/ext/iconv/iconv.so*
2.0.0-p0/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/lib/iconv/iconv.so*

$ ls -1 2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/*/*/*.so
2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/ext/iconv/iconv.so*

# NOTE THE MISSING /lib/iconv/iconv.so file in 2.0.0-p247 that is present in 2.0.0-p0 gems installation.

$ rbenv version
2.0.0-p247 (set by /home/XXX/tmp/.ruby-version)
$ rbenv which gem
/home/XXX/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/bin/gem
$ gem --version
1.8.25

$ rbenv which pry
/home/XXX/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/bin/pry
$ pry
[1] pry(main)> require 'iconv'
LoadError: cannot load such file -- iconv/iconv.so
from /home/XXX/.rbenv/versions/2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/site_ruby/2.0.0/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'

# Copy the file over

$ pushd ~/.rbenv/versions/
$ cp 2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/ext/iconv/iconv.so 2.0.0-p247/lib/ruby/gems/2.0.0/gems/iconv-1.0.3/lib/iconv/

# NOW IT WORKS!

$ pry
[1] pry(main)> require 'iconv'
=> true

I had to install gcc first before running `./configure --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.13.1`

I followed instructions from nokogiri installation page and also installed xcode tools. But it still did not work for me.

Then I saw that `brew install libxml2 libxslt` command outputs the following (among other different stuff):

To allow the nokogiri gem to link against this libxslt run:
gem install nokogiri -- --with-xslt-dir=/usr/local/opt/libxslt

So, I run this and nokogiri was installed succesfully.

I ran into this, this morning... after an upgrade to Mavericks. We did many things. However if anyone is having this issue here are some things to try.

I ran 'xcode-select --install' then got the command line tools installed (surprised this didn't update on the OS ugrade).
I ran 'rvm implode' (I will build it back up later).

We pieced together two error output files:

~/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/nokogiri-1.6.3.1/ext/nokogiri/gem_make.out

~/.vagrant.d/gems/gems/nokogiri-1.6.3.1/ext/nokogiri/tmp/x86_64-apple-darwin12.5.0/ports/libxml2/2.8.0/configure.log

Which seemed to indicate that the c compiler was using a surprising setting.

I ran 'env'

Output contained:

...
CXX=/usr/local/opt/apple-gcc42/bin/g++-4.2
...
CC=/usr/local/opt/apple-gcc42/bin/gcc-4.2
...

These files didn't exist on the file system...

After all of these changes moving to a new terminal windows (so everything was fresh). Installation of vagrant-berkshelf (which in turn installs nokogiri) worked fine.

NOTE: when running 'env' in the fresh window there was no longer a setting for CC or CXX...

Unsure on the key part of this, or if order matters, but tried to recreate the parts that seemed to play a role in getting this to work.

This works for me:



gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries

If you are using Bundler, tell it to use the option:

bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries
bundle install

[ref][1]


[1]:

[To see links please register here]

You could also do this on Mavericks:

gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries=true --with-xml2-include=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.9.sdk/usr/include/libxml2

Just make sure you have xcode installed

- As a self-contained solution, I've put together [this ruby script as a gist]() that should work with any recent Mac OS X / Homebrew installation.
- You're basically just on on relying Homebrew's libraries instead of the outdated Apple ones. Simple.
- You can configure and install with Bundler (instead of `gem`) by passing `bundle` as an argument.

Check it out, and please feel free to contribute--maybe we can boil this down to one script to fix them all!