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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T05:30:08+00:00

I’m just starting out with Ruby (and rails). I did the setup according to

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I’m just starting out with Ruby (and rails). I did the setup according to http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book#sec:ruby gems, using rvm. I have everything working well with sqlite.

Now I’d like to try converting things over to MySQL, since that’s what I do most of my development with. In my Gemfile I’ve replaced sqlite with mysql2:

group :development, :test do
#  gem 'sqlite3', '1.3.5'
  gem 'mysql2'
  gem 'rspec-rails', '2.9.0'
end

But when I try to create the DB for rails in MySQL I get:

$ rake db:create --trace
rake aborted!
dlopen(/Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@rails3tutorial2ndEd/gems/mysql2-0.3.11/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle, 9): Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
  Referenced from: /Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@rails3tutorial2ndEd/gems/mysql2-0.3.11/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle
  Reason: image not found - /Users/username/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p194@rails3tutorial2ndEd/gems/mysql2-0.3.11/lib/mysql2/mysql2.bundle

I’ve seen other postings recommending re-installing MySQL via homebrew (mine was installed via a downloadable DMG), but I’d prefer not to do that as I have several other databases in there already for other non-ruby projects.

I do in fact have the file that Rails is looking for; it’s installed in /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib. What’s the best way to tell Rails how to locate it?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The solution is pretty easy; Add the library path in your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile file:

    MYSQL=/usr/local/mysql/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$MYSQL
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

    If it is still not working (this work for me):

    sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib

    There are many blogs with install_name_tool, which won’t work for me because I’m on OSX Lion:

    sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/bin/indexer
sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/bin/search
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