Resolving trouble with Ruby On Rails with MySql on XAMPP on OSX Snow Leopard

I was trying to work through the Get Started guide of Ruby On Rails but I had issues when I was trying to run the command “rake db:migrate” the first time.

It was complaining that the mysql gem was not up to date or something and I had to do a “gem install mysql”. But that resulted in errors as decribed in the following blog posts:
http://wonko.com/post/how-to-install-the-mysqlruby-gem-on-mac-os-x-leopard#comment-5544

http://boonedocks.net/mike/archives/175-MAMP-and-the-Ruby-MySQL-Gem.html

I had issues as I was using XAMPP and “gem install mysql” was complaining about missing mysql.h I had to upgrade my XAMPP and additionally download the XAMPP developer tools.

Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/files/ and download:
xampp-macosx-1.7.2a.dmg
xampp-macosx-1.7.2a-dev.dmg

Of course first I had to remove/backup my existing XAMPP folder under /Applications/xampp Then I installed the new version and after that the xampp-macosx-1.7.2a-dev.dmg developer pack. this xampp-macosx-1.7.2a-dev.dmg contains the mysql.h header files and so on. After that dev tools installation the XAMPP folder has a new folder called “include” which has all the mysql header files like mysql.h Then the following command line worked for me:

sudo ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386″ gem install mysql — –with-mysql-dir=/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/

Note I was pointing to the xamppfiles base-dir as the mysql-dir, because then all the paths are relative as if this would be the mysql root dir.

Update: But as I am writing this, I was running into new trouble. It seems I need to update to the 64bit MySQL Version because of Snow Leopard, because now I am running into new problems:

Couldn’t create database for {”username”=>”root”, “adapter”=>”mysql”, “database”=>”mydatabase”, “password”=>nil, “socket”=>”/tmp/mysql.sock”}, charset: utf8, collation: utf8_unicode_ci (if you set the charset manually, make sure you have a matching collation)

According to http://www.techskater.com/ruby-on-rails/problems-with-mysql-gem-and-rake-on-snow-leopard/ this seems to be related to Snow Leopard and MySql 32bit vs. 64bit. On Snow Leopard the Gem Mysql needs to be build against a 64bit mysql or so.

I am currently reading http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard to resolve the issues and update MySQL. Let’s see…

Update 2: So I have finally installed MySQL 64Bit as suggested on the page above and I can start it. A “rake db:create” has also worked now as I could verify via MySQL Query browser. Let’s see what is the next thing which is not working…

Update 3: It really looks I am done and I am currently working through the Getting Started Guide.

Conclusion: 3 hours wasted to get it running on my OSX Snow Leopard. I did the same yesterday on my Windows machine at work and I didn’t have any such problems. It seems to be only related to Snow Leopard.  You might just read this page http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard and ignore everything above, but I leave it in this blog post for further reference. The difference is that you might not continue using the MySQL from XAMPP but a standalone mySQL. But you can still use phpMyAdmin from XAMPP or MySQL Query Browser to manage your database.