Question

I always worked my way around Nokogiri installation issues by following the documentation in the “Installing Nokogiri” tutorial.

But this time, even after installing all the dependencies, Nokogiri hasn’t been installed. I get the following error:

libxml2 is missing.  please visit <http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html>

I tried installing it by specifying the libxml2 and libxslt directories:

sudo gem install nokogiri -- --with-xml2-include=/usr/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=/usr/lib --with-xslt-dir=/usr/

but it returned the same error.

I followed all the other related Stack Overflow articles and none helped. Does anyone have a solution?

Answer 1

First, install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

If you still receive the error, you may be missing a compiler toolchain:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

You’ll get the “libxml2 is missing” error if you’re missing a build toolchain (at least I ran into this issue on Debian Lenny).

The Nokogiri build test-compiles a libxml2 header file to verify that it is present, however, it doesn’t differentiate between “libxml2 is missing” and “a compiler to test libxml2 is missing”.