Rails – Bundle install problems with json

Question

I'm running OS X Mavericks, with Rails 3.2.12. When I try to do rails new project, it gets stuck at bundle install.

Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p392/bin/ruby extconf.rb 
creating Makefile

make
compiling generator.c
make: gcc-4.2: No such file or directory
make: *** [generator.o] Error 1


Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/json-1.8.1 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p392/gems/json-1.8.1/ext/json/ext/generator/gem_make.out
An error occurred while installing json (1.8.1), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install json -v '1.8.1'` succeeds before bundling.

I get the same error when I do 'gem install json....' as it suggests. I've installed the latest version of Xcode, with the command line tools. When I do:

which gcc

I get:

/usr/bin/gcc

I'm new to all this stuff really, so please try to keep things simple.

Answer 1

So, prior to XCode 5, there was a gcc-4.2 binary, which got removed in the upgrade.

I found this tutorial helpful in getting gcc-4.2 back and running with ruby. It assumes that you're using homebrew to manage packages on your Mac.