Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Accidental Technologist

Errors Installing the pg Gem When Using Heroku Postgres.app

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: