Rails error while installing fcgi: Failed to build gem native extension

Question

I was running the command

bundle install

on my Rails project, and it gave the error:

...
Using activerecord (3.0.11) 
Using activeresource (3.0.11) 
Using bigdecimal (1.1.0) 
Installing fcgi (0.8.8) with native extensions 
Gem::Installer::ExtensionBuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    /home/jjboat/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p194/bin/ruby extconf.rb 
checking for fcgiapp.h... no
checking for fastcgi/fcgiapp.h... no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Answer 1

You need to install the fcgi development package to be able to build native extensions (and you have to have install a C build chain before that as well). You haven't specified your distro here, but on Red Hat (and derivatives like Fedora) you'll generally do it like this:

sudo yum install fcgi-devel

and on Debian (and Ubuntu) you can do the same like this:

sudo apt-get install libfcgi-dev

I'm not 100% certain about the name of the package in Debian, but it should be easy for you to figure it out.

Answer 2

If you hit this same error with the fcgi gem on MacOS X (tested on 10.7.5). You can get the development packages required using homebrew (Link):

brew install fcgi

Then you should be all set to install the gem:

gem install fcgi -v '0.8.8'