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When I try to install gems like ohai and fpm on my Amazon Linux EC2 instance I get the error message:

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-43-16 ~]$ sudo gem install ohai Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing ohai: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby2.0 extconf.rb Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/share/ruby/gems/2.0/gems/ffi-1.9.6 for inspection. Results logged to /usr/local/share/ruby/gems/2.0/gems/ffi-1.9.6/ext/ffi_c/gem_make.out

That's it, no additional hints. The message is identical with fpm.

I've Googled and have done everything that I think I'm supposed to do. I have yum installed gcc, make, install, ruby-devel - in fact in a fit of trying everything I yum installed everything ruby20*, rubygem[s]20*, etc. and yum updated the hell out of my whole system. I have done a gem update --system.

I was able to gem install facter, which doesn't build a native extension, so the rest of Rubyville seems fine.

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  • Did you actually look at the log file? Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 21:04
  • Yeah gem_make.out just says "/usr/bin/ruby2.0 extconf.rb". Or is there some other one I don't know about? Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 21:14
  • Really? That's the entire contents of the file?! Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 21:25
  • Yep. Alas. Not a lot to go on I know. Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 21:27
  • I got a little farther, an explicit gem install ffi got that in and then it errored on libyajl2, I gem installed that explicitly, then it is failing on ffi-yajl and I can't get that to install by itself. Still jack in the log file. Commented Oct 22, 2014 at 21:29

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There's a similar question and answer over here: https://github.com/sj26/mailcatcher/issues/144

In that case it came to a suggestion to reinstall ruby and that worked YMMV. In that case build-essentials was an important item checked for along the way (Ubuntu system, not CentOS). I gather the CentOS equivalent is yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

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