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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T11:09:18+00:00

I’m trying to do file uploads with ruby 1.8 and it seems like there

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I’m trying to do file uploads with ruby 1.8 and it seems like there are no good out-of-the-box solutions. They all seem to need some 3rd party patch or fork of a project to work. I would use mechanize but I actually need to interface with an xml api and mechanize seems to be made specifically for dealing directly with webpages. I’ve tried RestClient but it doesn’t have that functionality for multipart forms out of the box, you have to use a fork of the project to get it to work. Similar situations seem to exist for Net:HTTP
I’m thinking curb would be the way to go since I may want to use multicurl anyways for some other things I plan to do. However, on my windows machine I can’t seem to install the curb gem. gem install curb gives an error saying I need to specify where the curl library lives.. I’ve tried passing options to extconf but no luck so far.
Here is the output of gem install curb without any options

C:\ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\curb-0.5.4.0>gem install curb
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing curb:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

C:/ruby/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
checking for curl-config... no
checking for main() in curl.lib... 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.

Provided configuration options:
        --with-opt-dir
        --without-opt-dir
        --with-opt-include
        --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
        --with-opt-lib
        --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
        --with-make-prog
        --srcdir=.
        --curdir
        --ruby=C:/ruby/bin/ruby
        --with-curl-dir
        --without-curl-dir
        --with-curl-include
        --without-curl-include=${curl-dir}/include
        --with-curl-lib
        --without-curl-lib=${curl-dir}/lib
        --with-curllib
        --without-curllib
extconf.rb:12:   Can't find libcurl or curl/curl.h (RuntimeError)

  Try passing --with-curl-dir or --with-curl-lib and --with-curl-include
  options to extconf.


Gem files will remain installed in C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/curb-0.5.4.0 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/curb-0.5.4.0/ext/gem_make.out

Any ideas how I can get this to work?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As I commented already, I did find a solution which was simply using the rest-client provided in the github gems..
    gem install rest-client
    will get the job done.
    From there you can do a multipart post which can contain 1 or more files.. It has all the flexibility one could need in a rest-client.
    See the documentation here: http://rdoc.info/projects/archiloque/rest-client
    for examples on how to use it.

    The only thing I found that it didn’t do correctly was parsing cookies. The cookies my company uses can have equal signs in the values and it doesn’t parse them correctly. I had put in some hacks to get around the issue but eventually that came back to bite me.. So just the other day I started analyzing the code from Mechanize/WEBrick and was able to utilize the CookieJar from Mechanize to manage cookies from the rest-client.. Hopefully I can get the author of the rest-client to build this functionality into the rest-client so others won’t have the same problems I had..

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