<-|**|->

My MacBook had a blowout the other day. Sent it to Apple and they had to replace the hard drive. That said, I’ve spent most of the day reinstalling everything. I tried to use the ruby that comes with OSX, but was having too many issues so I went with a basic install from source.

The problem I had was when I tried to MySQL working. I installed MySQL via the 64-bit .pkg they have on their site. That took fine. The issue was installing the mysql ruby gem. I kept getting errors from extconf.rb about missing headers, etc. After an hour of googling and trying everything from an OSX Ports install and compiling against the 32-bit MySQL files, I finally got it.

The golden combo in the end was to install MySQL from source (mysql-5.1.33-osx10.5-x86_64.tar) but then don’t try to use the gem command to install the mysql gem. Instead, I grabbed the latest source version of the gem here and simply followed the install instructions

% ruby ./setup.rb
% ruby ./test.rb localhost root
# ruby ./install.rb


And it works!
Hopefully this helps someone else. I know I’ll probably forget and need this in a year or less…