Nokogiri installation fails -libxml2 is missing

Question

I always worked my way around Nokogiri installation issues by following the documentation in the \"Installing Nokogiri\" tutorial.

But this time, even after installi

Answer 1

I just had the same issue on Fedora 13. After a frustrating and unsuccessful search to make

gem install nokogiri

work for me, I was able to install it and get around the libxml2 error via yum.

Simply install the gem via yum instead of the gem command:

su
yum search rubygem-nokogiri   #this find the proper package name
yum install rubygem-nokogiri.i686

This helped me find the right answer for Fedora and, as I am using RVM for Ruby package management,

yum install rubygem-nokogiri

will pull in all the Ruby gems and dependencies into the system, not into my RVM environment, and in my experience that leads to a very frustrating and humbling experience.

So, taking your find of the Nokogiri yum gem you can use:

yum provides  rubygem-nokogiri

and get a list of the dependencies for rubygem-Nokogiri which showed me the libraries that were missing. After that I ran:

yum install libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel

Now Nokogiri compiles in Fedora and Nokogiri installs. D'oh!, we need the headers to compile Nokogiri from the devel libraries.