How do I get a list of gems that are installed that have native extensions?

Question

I'm on windows, and have updated from ruby 1.8.x to 1.9.x, and am now getting error popups that complain ruby-mssomethingrt.1.8.x.dll is missing.

I would like to find out which gems have native extensions, so I can uninstall them and force a rebuild of the native extensions locally during installation again, to make the error go away.

Answer 1

Based on this answer, here is a solution that finds and offers to reinstall gems with native extensions that works with recent rubies (>=1.9).

native_gems = []
Gem::Specification.each do |spec|
  native_gems << "#{spec.name}:#{spec.version}" unless spec.extensions.empty?
end

install_cmd = "gem install #{native_gems.join ' '}"
puts "Found #{native_gems.length} gem(s) with native extensions:"
puts "\n> " + install_cmd, "\nReinstall gems with above command? (yn)"

exec insall_cmd if gets.downcase[0] == 'y'

Example Output:

Found 36 gem(s) with native extensions:

> gem install atomic:1.1.13 bcrypt-ruby:3.0.1 bigdecimal:1.2.0 eventmachine:1.0.3 eventmachine:1.0.0 eventmachine:0.12.10 ffi:1.9.3 ffi:1.9.0 ffi:1.7.0 hiredis:0.4.5 hpricot:0.8.6 io-console:0.4.2 json:1.8.1 json:1.8.0 json:1.7.6 nokogiri:1.6.0 nokogiri:1.5.9 pg:0.17.1 pg:0.17.0 pg:0.16.0 pg:0.15.1 pg:0.13.2 psych:2.0.0 puma:2.7.1 puma:2.6.0 puma:2.4.0 puma:1.6.3 sqlite3:1.3.8 sqlite3:1.3.7 sqlite3:1.3.5 therubyracer:0.12.0 thin:1.5.1 thin:1.5.0 thin:1.4.1 websocket-driver:0.2.3 websocket-driver:0.1.0

Reinstall gems with above command? (yn)
…

Answer 2

A good start would be to look at the gem specification for each gem and see if it has the extensions field set. That should leave you with a short-list of gems to re-install. They don't necessarily all use native extensions, but if you look at the corresponding extconf.rb files, this should be pretty easy to find out.

Update: Here is a short ruby script to list those gems:

require 'rubygems'

Gem.source_index.each do |gem|
  spec =  Gem.source_index.specification(gem[0])
  ext = spec.extensions
  puts "#{gem[0]} has extensions: #{ext}" unless ext.empty?
end