For an upcoming Rails project, the plan is to use the sqlite database. On Windows, the whole process of getting this installed was easy. Download the DLL, do a gem install sqlite3& and be done.

Not so on OS X, where I plan to develop.

sqlite3 is installed by default, but trying to install the gem, I get a complaint about a missing sqlite.h file. Fair enough, it’s probably not there. So I download the tarball and do the “./configure && make && make install” dance.

I end up with this error message:

/usr/bin/libtool: for architecture: cputype (16777234) cpusubtype (0) file: -lSystem is not an object file (not allowed in a library)

some googling later, it seems to be related to wrong file permissions, so I repair the volumes file permissions (using the Mac Disc Utility). Re-running “make” yields the same error message.

Incidentally, this is the same error message I got, when I tried to use the Darwin Ports to install sqlite. So I guess, something in my system is hosed.

Update 1: The fix for compiling & linking was as easy as installing the Tiger version of the XCode Tools from the Tiger CD. Back when I upgraded to Tiger, I didn’t install them.

Update 2: When installing sqlite3, also install the sqlite3 gem: sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

To be continued

Technorati Tags: mac, rails, sqlite