Monthly Archives: February 2013

Error installing iconv

Today I was trying to install the iconv gem, and was getting this error

$gem install iconv
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing iconv:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        <rvm_dir>/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-preview2/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for rb_enc_get() in ruby/encoding.h... yes
checking for iconv() in iconv.h... no
checking for iconv() in -liconv... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary
libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more details.  You may
need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
	--with-opt-dir
	--without-opt-dir
	--with-opt-include
	--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
	--with-opt-lib
	--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
	--with-make-prog
	--without-make-prog
	--srcdir=.
	--curdir
	--ruby=<rvm_dir>/rubies/ruby-2.0.0-preview2/bin/ruby
	--with-iconv-dir
	--with-iconv-include
	--without-iconv-include=${iconv-dir}/include
	--with-iconv-lib
	--without-iconv-lib=${iconv-dir}/
	--enable-config-charset
	--disable-config-charset
	--with-config-charset
	--without-config-charset
	--with-iconvlib
	--without-iconvlib


Gem files will remain installed in <rvm_dir>/gems/ruby-2.0.0-preview2/gems/iconv-1.0.2 for inspection.
Results logged to <rvm_dir>/gems/ruby-2.0.0-preview2/gems/iconv-1.0.2/ext/iconv/gem_make.out

After a bit of searching, I found a number of answers suggesting that I would need to reinstall ruby via RVM, but in the following StackOverflow question
failed-to-build-iconv-gem-on-ruby-1-9-2.

In it was the solution:
gem install iconv -- --with-iconv-dir=/usr/local/Cellar/libiconv/1.13.1

After that, all was well.

–Proctor