Bumping heads with Rails

I decided that I might as well learn another language besides PHP ActionScript Perl C++ VB and Javascript: Ruby, and more specifically, the latest craze: Ruby on Rails. Why not? So I started to install it in my production server (Fedora Cora 4) and built Ruby from the source, then installed the gem updater package (I hate the name gem, but oh well), then I installed Rails from gem. This all went quite well. Now comes the annoying part: I can’t get the stupid MySQL driver to install. Normally you can install the Ruby MySQL driver from the Linux console like this:

gem install mysql

…but then I ran into problems - I kept getting this error:

checking for mysql_ssl_set()... no
checking for mysql.h... no
checking for mysql/mysql.h... no
*** /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/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.

To make a long story short, I wasted 2 hours trying to get this thing installed without success, so I looked into the problem and it was as simple as this:

You NEED mysql-devel installed to install the Ruby MySQL driver because it uses the native MySQL driver source. So all you need to do in FC4 to get it to work is this:

yum install mysql-devel

Dang that was easy. I’m sure I will have something else up here about Rails, unless I get sidetracked with Flex2 and Actionscript3 again :(

stevekamerman

COO @scientiamobile