Accidental Technologist

Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

  • Home
  • About
  • Still River Software
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Genesis

You are here: Home / Ruby on Rails / Errors Installing the pg Gem When Using Heroku Postgres.app

Errors Installing the pg Gem When Using Heroku Postgres.app

December 19, 2013 by Rob Bazinet Leave a Comment

Tweet

I?ve been using the PostgreSQL Mac OS X app from Mattt Thompson and Heroku for quite some time now. ?If you don?t know what it is, it?s a drop in app bundle for the PostgreSQL database. ?There are many ways that work, this just happens to be really simple.

I use PostgreSQL with my Ruby on Rails projects and combine that with the pg ruby gem. ?

I ran into a situation where the pg gem would not install because it could not find pg_config in a known location on my Mac. ?The error occurred on Rails 3.2 but 4.0 may show the same behavior. ?

The Error

The error can come up when running a bundle install or just a straight gem install pg from the command line. The resulting error may look something like this:

Installing pg (0.17.0) with native extensions 
Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension
.
.
.
.
An error occurred while installing pg (0.17.0), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install pg -v ?0.17.0'` succeeds before bundling.

The Solution

I already mentioned the problem is the gem install not finding pg_config during installation. ?So let?s find it.

1. First, find where pg_config is located. ?Run this command from a terminal window:
which pg_config

Should display something like this:

/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/pg_config

2. You can tell RubyGems where your pg_config file is located:

gem install pg -- --with-pg-config='PATH_TO_YOUR_PG_CONFIG'

For example, pg_config is here on my system:

/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/pg_config

So I would install the gem this way:

gem install pg -- --with-pg-config='/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/pg_config'

The pg gem should now install. I hope this helps.

UPDATE: Scott Watermasysk points out another good solution:

@rbazinet another route that worked for me was to put the pg.app (as a folder) in my path. This allows the config to be properly found.

? Scott Watermasysk (@scottw) December 19, 2013

Share this:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Email
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Tumblr
  • Pocket
  • Reddit

Related

Filed Under: Ruby on Rails Tagged With: postgresapp, postgresql, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, rubygem

Care about your privacy? I do and use Fathom Analytics on this site.

Fathom Analytics

Recent Posts

  • How to Fix Rails Flash Rendering When Using Hotwire
  • Hotwire Fix for CORS Error when using Omniauth
  • Fix Installation of Ruby using rbenv on macOS Big Sur
  • RailsConf 2021 and the Future of Conferences
  • Fixing Out of Diskspace Errors on Amazon EC2

Categories

Services I Love

HatchBox - Easy Rails Deploys Fathom Analytics
Follow @rbazinet

Rob Bazinet
@rbazinet

  • This is so true and has been my personal take on people complaining they are busy - https://t.co/YW8NTQLXtl
    about 3 days ago
  • Wow…https://t.co/h94ia053sL
    about 4 days ago
  • My Bills lost today but more importantly so did the Dallas Cowboys. Nice seeing the ‘boys done for the season.
    about 5 days ago
  • It looks like the Apple Xcode command line tools is a bit bloated for it to take this long… https://t.co/U0HObTvzXf
    about 2 months ago
  • How many people are mad that @elonmusk bought Twitter yet own or plan to own a Tesla? I bet many.
    about 2 months ago
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments