Problems installing gems with native extensions on Amazon Linux

Question

When I try to install gems like ohai and fpm on my Amazon Linux EC2 instance I get the error message:

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-43-16 ~]$ sudo gem install ohai
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing ohai:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /usr/bin/ruby2.0 extconf.rb

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/share/ruby/gems/2.0/gems/ffi-1.9.6 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/share/ruby/gems/2.0/gems/ffi-1.9.6/ext/ffi_c/gem_make.out

That's it, no additional hints. The message is identical with fpm.

I've Googled and have done everything that I think I'm supposed to do. I have yum installed gcc, make, install, ruby-devel - in fact in a fit of trying everything I yum installed everything ruby20*, rubygem[s]20*, etc. and yum updated the hell out of my whole system. I have done a gem update --system.

I was able to gem install facter, which doesn't build a native extension, so the rest of Rubyville seems fine.

Yeah gem_make.out just says "/usr/bin/ruby2.0 extconf.rb". Or is there some other one I don't know about? — Ernest Mueller, Oct 22 '14 at 21:14
I got a little farther, an explicit gem install ffi got that in and then it errored on libyajl2, I gem installed that explicitly, then it is failing on ffi-yajl and I can't get that to install by itself. Still jack in the log file. — Ernest Mueller, Oct 22 '14 at 21:29
No. From some extended reading in loosely related issues I am thinking it may be running out of memory during compilation (I'm on a t1.micro) so will try adding a swap file and/or just doing it on a bigger instance. — Ernest Mueller, Oct 31 '14 at 17:25

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 28 '14 at 06:02

There's a similar question and answer over here: https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher/issues/144

In that case it came to a suggestion to reinstall ruby and that worked YMMV. In that case build-essentials was an important item checked for along the way (Ubuntu system, not CentOS). I gather the CentOS equivalent is yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Problems installing gems with native extensions on Amazon Linux

1 Answers1