Installing TravisCI Ruby Gem on Fedora 28

I encountered difficulties trying to install TravisCI’s ‘travis’ Ruby Gem on my Fedora 28 laptop. This was the full error log that I received.

[[email protected] ~]$ sudo gem install travis --no-rdoc --no-ri
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing travis:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

current directory: /usr/local/share/gems/gems/ffi-1.9.25/ext/ffi_c
/usr/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20180624-6629-nze4f3.rb extconf.rb
*** 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}/lib64
--with-make-prog
--without-make-prog
--srcdir=.
--curdir
--ruby=/usr/bin/$(RUBY_BASE_NAME)
--with-ffi_c-dir
--without-ffi_c-dir
--with-ffi_c-include
--without-ffi_c-include=${ffi_c-dir}/include
--with-ffi_c-lib
--without-ffi_c-lib=${ffi_c-dir}/lib64
--with-libffi-config
--without-libffi-config
--with-pkg-config
--without-pkg-config
/usr/share/ruby/mkmf.rb:456:in `try_do': The compiler failed to generate an executable file. (RuntimeError)
You have to install development tools first.
from /usr/share/ruby/mkmf.rb:541:in `try_link0'
from /usr/share/ruby/mkmf.rb:559:in `try_link'
from /usr/share/ruby/mkmf.rb:660:in `try_ldflags'
from /usr/share/ruby/mkmf.rb:1820:in `pkg_config'
from extconf.rb:15:in `<main>'

To see why this extension failed to compile, please check the mkmf.log which can be found here:

/usr/local/lib64/gems/ruby/ffi-1.9.25/mkmf.log

extconf failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/share/gems/gems/ffi-1.9.25 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/lib64/gems/ruby/ffi-1.9.25/gem_make.out

After looking at the error log and searching the web about this error, it was because I’m missing some dependencies that was required. I’ve came up with a fool-proof divine formula that installs the dependencies required. The command is as follow:

sudo dnf install redhat-rpm-config ruby ruby-devel make make-devel libffi libffi-devel

I hope that helps you! If that doesn’t help resolve the issue for you, feel free to leave a comment below.

Author: Woo Huiren

Currently a student at National University of Singapore. I contribute to opensource projects - primarily PHP and Angular related. I write about PCF and PWS related stuff too. View all posts by Woo Huiren