clog: Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX

Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX

chrisp — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 12:05:00 -0800

I installed the Ruby GD2 gem on my Mac last night and found myself getting the following error:

ruby/gems/1.8/gems/gd2-1.1.1/lib/gd2.rb:59:in `initialize’:RuntimeError: dlopen(libgd.2.dylib, 9): image not found

It didn’t take very long to figure out that OSX doesn’t seem to come with any version of libgd. After bouncing around with trying to get RMagick installed instead, and finding very little documentation on setting up the Ruby GD2 library, I decided to install the gd2 package via ports and reinstalled the gem with the same results. It still wasn’t finding libgd because the ports library path (/opt/local/lib) is not set in my path. I don’t set this because I want anything self-compiled to only use the Mac libraries. After some digging, I found that I could specify the path in the Ruby GD2 source.

To fix it I changed line 33 in “ruby/gems/1.8/gems/gd2-1.1.1/lib/gd2.rb” from:

case Config::CONFIG[‘arch’]
when /darwin/
‘libgd.2.dylib’

to:

case Config::CONFIG[‘arch’]
when /darwin/
‘/opt/local/lib/libgd.2.dylib’

It’s not the cleanest fix, but it’s good enough for development purposes. Hopefully this saves a few people from some of the circles I went through figuring this out. It does seem that this is a least a more simple fix than what’s required to get the RMagick library running on OSX.

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by Eric Pugh

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:59:15 -0700

I added a different hack that looks like this:

#FIXME: I changed this so that if the lib isn’t found, then we use the # hardcoded path as defined in the blog post # http://blog.chrispcritter.com/articles/2006/11/26/getting-ruby-gd2-working-on-osx begin LIB = DL.dlopen(gdlibraryname) rescue RuntimeError LIB = DL.dlopen(‘/opt/local/lib/libgd.2.dylib’) end

That way if the regular one works, great!

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by Eric Pugh

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:57:02 -0700

I added a different hack that looks like this:

That way if the regular one works, great!

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by Yasuko

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:01:46 -0700

I was saved! This article was the only one I found about my trouble. Thank you very match.

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by scott

Fri, 16 May 2008 08:39:18 -0700

got rid of my pain - thanks for the article and the comments - I used a symlink. didn’t fully understand the LDPATH solution but interested to learn more. thanks…scott

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by freegenie

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:57:01 -0700

I found it quick and useful, thanks.

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by kennon

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:45:41 -0700

I think the better solution would be for the library to check LDPATH, and then you could add /opt/local/lib to LDPATH.

"Getting Ruby GD2 working on OSX" by krafthus.dk

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 06:15:17 -0800

Rather than having to edit the gem, I find it cleaner to just symlink the library from /usr/lib:

flake:/usr/lib morten$ sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libgd.2.dylib