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I'm trying to run a Ruby script, so I installed Ruby together with Ruby gems on my Mac OS X 10.7 system. The script requires the Rubygem "mechanize" so I tried to install it by using:

sudo gem install mechanize

However this fails with an error:

Error installing mechanize: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb checking for libxml/parser.h... no ----- libxml2 is missing. please visit http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html for help with installing dependencies.

So it seems libxml2 is missing or not found. What is the easiest way to install it? It's already in /usr/lib:

/usr/lib/libxml2.2.7.3.dylib 
/usr/lib/libxml2.dylib 
/usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib

I have to add that I don't know anything about Ruby programming, I just want to run a little script I found at github.

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  • Yes there are: /usr/lib/libxml2.2.7.3.dylib /usr/lib/libxml2.dylib /usr/lib/libxml2.2.dylib
    – asdrubael
    Feb 2, 2012 at 21:53
  • I mean, you shouldn't need sudo to install gems, but that can't possibly be the problem. You actually have libxml2 already installed. I unfortunately can't test this, as I'm not on Lion. The issue is not with mechanize itself, but with nokogiri, so if you can install that first, mechanize should install fine. Some people mention installing libxml2 themselves using Homebrew and this gist (but updating all mentions of 2.7.7 to 2.7.8 before). That could be worth trying.
    – slhck
    Feb 2, 2012 at 22:12

1 Answer 1

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I installed Xcode and re-build libxml2 and libxslt manually like described here tar xzvf libxml2-2.7.3.tar.gz cd libxml2-2.7.3 ./configure --with-python=/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/ make sudo make install

cd /usr/local/src
curl -O ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxslt/libxslt-1.1.20.tar.gz
cd libxslt-1.1.20
./configure
make
sudo make install
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