Installing mysql2 Gem on Mac with Apple Silicon

Introduction

Recently, I’m helping an old friend to upgrade their old Rails 4.2.8 + Ruby 2 project to Rail 5 and Ruby 3. Because it just cant run on new machinese anymore.

The biggest trouble I faced doing this was getting all these dependency gems getting installed and making the project run on my new Apple Silicon Mac (M4 Air to be precise). Well since the project is too old, it cant really run on any new machine anymore. Some gems don’t even exist anymore.

At some point i was stuck on installing mysql2 gem. Which alwasy failed on building native extensions.

After googling lots and trying quite a few from github issues and stack overflow. This github issue answer actually helped. https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/issues/1346#issuecomment-1920076974

So what i did was:

Install mysql with homebrew

brew install mysql

2 Install libraries needed brew install mysql-connector-c

Now manually install mysql2, instead of using bundle install:

gem install mysql2 -- --with-mysql-dir="/opt/homebrew/opt/mysql-client"

now back to bundile install, it should just work.

A bit sad to see my projects are being too old that things are not supported anymore….. time does go fly….my friends.