Segmentation fault with Rails after upgrading to OS Sierra, possibly related to sqlite3 gem

Question

After upgrading to OSX Sierra I am having an issue with random segmentation faults. It most commonly occurs when running rails test and I believe it is due to the sqlite3_adapter.

My present work around is to simply quit terminal and restart it. This works for about 1 or 2 rails test and by the third one I am almost guaranteed to get another segmentation fault.

Is anybody else having an issue with this or find a better workaround?

$ rails t
Running via Spring preloader in process 13817
/Users/USER/.rbenv/versions/2.3.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.3.0/gems/activerecord-5.0.0.1/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/sqlite3_adapter.rb:27: [BUG] Segmentation fault at 0x00000000000110
ruby 2.3.1p112 (2016-04-26 revision 54768) [x86_64-darwin16]

Edit:

After digging into the sqlite3_adapter.rb, I see that the line causing the segmentation fault is the creation of a new SQlite3 database.

db = SQLite3::Database.new(
    config[:database].to_s,
    :results_as_hash => true
)

Edit 2:

Rather than quitting and restarting terminal, I have found that running:

spring stop

stops the problem temporarily. Not a solution, but a better work around.

Edit 3:

This appears to be a problem with Apple's supplied libsqlite3 not being fork safe. More info can be found here:

https://github.com/sparklemotion/sqlite3-ruby/issues/195

For now, I have created an alias at the bottom of my ~/.bashrc file:

alias ss='spring stop'

When the problem occurs, I can now type:

ss

and then rerun the test.

Answer 1

Looks like a patch has been issued! The patch will look for sqlite3 in your brew folder instead of using Apple's supplied version by default. Simply run:

bundle update

to get the latest version of sqlite3-ruby and if you don't already have sqlite3 installed in your homebrew directory, run:

brew install sqlite3

Answer 2

I had the same problem when upgrading to Sierra. A simple bundle update will do the trick! Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Try rebuilding the sqlite3 gem. It has native extensions, and recompiling them in the Sierra environment may fix the issue.

Run:

gem pristine sqlite3

Which should give output like:

Restoring gems to pristine condition...
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Restored sqlite3-1.3.10
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Restored sqlite3-1.3.11

Answer 4

I've noticed that I get a segfault as well, when trying to run rails console --sandbox specifically. I found this other question that seemed to fix this issue; specifically running

xcode-select --install

seemed to resolve it. This is by no means scientifically proven yet, however I am now able to run a rails console and all tests without a ruby segment fault.