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Development Tools Installing a Ruby on Rails Development Environment in Windows

Ian Rushton
Ian Rushton
15,789 Points
Posted by Ian Rushton
Ian Rushton
15,789 Points

ERROR installing SQLite3 and Nokogiri.

When trying to install SQLite3 using cmder I keep getting this message:

gem install sqlite3-1.3.11-x64-mingw32.gem
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::Ext::BuildError)
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

    C:/Ruby21/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb
creating Makefile

mingw32-make "DESTDIR=" clean
'mingw32-make' is not recognized as an interal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

mingw32-make "DESTDIR="
'mingw32-make' is not recognized as an interal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

make failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in C:/Ruby21/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/ems/json-1.8.3 for inspection.
Results logged to C:/Ruby21/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/extensions/x64-mingw32/2.1.0/json-1.8.3/gem_make.out

Originally it was saying that 'make' was not an internal/external command but I saw somewhere that calling 

set make=mingw32-make

Was the way to fix this issue and it appears not to have worked.

Can anyone please help me out? I always seem to have these kinds of problems where I can't even begin to work out what may have gone wrong... Deary me!!

2 Answers

Cena Mayo
Cena Mayo
55,236 Points

Hi Ian,

The issue is that Ruby doesn't know where to find mingw32-make, likely because it's not in your path.

Take a look at the environment settings section of the MingW32 install guide.

The short(er) version is:

1. Right-click on your "My Computer" icon and select "Properties".
2. Click on the "Advanced" tab, then on the "Environment Variables" button.
3. You should be presented with a dialog box with two text boxes. The top box shows your 
user settings. The PATH entry in this box is the one you want to modify. Note that the bottom
 text box allows you to change the system PATH variable. You should not alter the system 
path variable in any manner, or you will cause all sorts of problems for you and your computer!
4. Click on the PATH entry in the TOP box, then click on the "Edit" button
5. Scroll to the end of the string and at the end add ;<installation-directory>\bin
6. press OK -> OK -> OK and you are done.

NOTE: Substitute <installation-directory> with the FULL absolute path name of the installation 
target directory you chose (ie C:\MinGW);

NOTE: If you installed MSYS, you may also want to add ";<installation-directory>\MSYS\1.0\local\bin",
 and ";<installation-directory>\MSYS\1.0\bin" to the end of your user PATH variable.

Best, Cena