ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

June 30, 2008 ~ Leo Petrazickis

I ran into a tiny pickle while installing the ibm_db gem on Ubuntu:

Select which gem to install for your platform (i486-linux)
 1. ibm_db 0.9.5 (ruby)
 2. ibm_db 0.9.5 (mswin32)
 3. ibm_db 0.9.4 (ruby)
 4. ibm_db 0.9.4 (mswin32)
 5. Skip this gem
 6. Cancel installation
> 1
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError)
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

ruby extconf.rb install ibm_db
extconf.rb:9:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
	from extconf.rb:9

The problem is that mkmf isn’t included in the base Ruby package on Ubuntu. You need need the full development package to install gems from source. Installing it solves the problem.

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

Published by Leo Petrazickis

I’m a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Autonomic. I do Golang, Ruby, JS, Python, Elixir, as well as web scale devops with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes and Docker. View all posts by Leo Petrazickis

6 thoughts on “ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.”

Error: please fill the required fields (name, email). says:

July 3, 2008 at 6:54 pm

pickles are in python not ruby 🙂

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Leons Petrazickis says:

July 7, 2008 at 11:46 am

I think you will find that they are actually in PHP, what with PECL and all.

http://pecl.php.net/

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Faisal says:

November 22, 2008 at 1:54 am

Thanks a lot it solved my problem.I was missing the package i.e ruby1.8-dev

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cz9qvh says:

June 3, 2009 at 3:25 pm

Thank you, that helped a bunch.

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isomorphisms says:

February 26, 2013 at 12:52 pm

Hmm, I have this error with gem install idn and I do have ruby1.9.1-dev selected.

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devolute says:

February 27, 2013 at 5:56 am

This fixed everything when I did `sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev`. Cheers!

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