FLPR

Installing the postgres adapter

Posted by Pat Mon, 05 Dec 2005 08:58:00 GMT

In a previous article, we installed the ruby-postgres adapter using the ports system. I’ve spoken with a few people, and they’ve suggested using the postgres gem instead.

Unfortunately you can’t just do a “gem install postgres” to install it, you have to go through a few extra steps in order to get it to build cleanly on FreeBSD. Fortunately, I’ve done it and have all the steps here :)

# gem install postgres

You’ll get a bunch of errors and it’ll say it can’t create the Makefile. Don’t worry about that. We have to manually configure and install the gem.

For whatever reason, the Postgres installation doesn’t put the libpq-fe.h file in its include dir, so we need to symlink it. Then we’ll configure and install the gem.

# ln -s /usr/local/include/libpq-fe.h /usr/local/include/postgresql/server/
# cd /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/postgres-0.7.1/
# ruby extconf.rb --with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/local/include/postgresql/server --with-pgsql-lib-dir=/usr/local/lib/postgresql
# make install

Should be all good to go. You’ll want to remove the ruby18-postgres package if you have it installed.