no such file to load — mkmf

While checking out Scott Baron’s coverage-tool for Ruby, insurance, I ran into a minor issue on my - by now - fairly beat up Debian installation.

jcop@mental:~$ sudo gem install insurance
Attempting local installation of 'insurance'
Local gem file not found: insurance*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'insurance'
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
        from extconf.rb:1

Thankfully, Google led me to the answer on RubyForge. For some reason, mkmf.rb is part of the ruby1.8-dev package, and initially I hadn’t installed that since it is described as

Header files for compiling extension modules for the Ruby 1.8

Ah well. A quick

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev

and everything trotted along happily after that.

Comments and Trackbacks

Actually, I had the same problem, and Google led me to…this article! So thanks for posting this, it solved my problem as well.

yea. thanks for the search friendly entry. saved me hours.

Me too. Google and real information make a great team!