Compiling on MacOS X

The EnterpriseDB packages are the recommended PostgreSQL installations to use with MacOS X. They eliminate most or all of the issues with getting ‘pg’ installed, linked correctly, and running.

Segfaults and SSL Support

If you need a custom installation of PostgreSQL, you should ensure that you either compile it against the same version of OpenSSL as the OpenSSL extension of the Ruby you’ll be using, or compile it without SSL support. If you fail to do this, you will likely see segfaults when you use ‘pg’ and the ‘openssl’ extension at the same time. You can see what library it’s linked against using ‘otool -L’; for example, on my 10.7 machine I use for ‘pg’ development:

$ otool -L /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions\
  /1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin11/openssl.bundle

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/\
    lib/ruby/1.8/universal-darwin11/openssl.bundle:
    /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/\
        usr/lib/libruby.dylib (compatibility version 1.8, \
        current version 1.8)
    /usr/lib/libssl.dylib (compatibility version 0.9, \
        current version 0.9)
    /usr/lib/libcrypto.dylib (compatibility version 0.9, \
        current version 0.9)
    /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0, \
        current version 159.0)

Dealing with Installation Problems

If you are building/installing pg on MacOS X, and the installation doesn’t work at first, here are a few things you can try.

pg_config

The first thing you should do is ensure that the ‘pg_config’ tool that comes with Postgres is in your path. If it isn’t, or the one that’s first in your path isn’t the one that was installed with the Postgres you want to build against, you can specify the path to it with the –with-pg-config option.

For example, if you’re using the Ruby binary that comes with OSX, and PostgreSQL 9.0.x installed from MacPorts, do:

gem install – –with-pg-config=/opt/local/lib/postgresql90/bin/pg_config

ARCHFLAGS and Universal Binaries

OS X supports both architecture-specific binaries (e.g. i386), as well as universal binaries (i.e. i386 & ppc). If Ruby is built as a universal binary and PostgreSQL is not, you need to specify the path to the appropriate pg_config binary or set the environment variable ARCHFLAGS appropriately.

Alternatively, if the build system can’t figure out which architectures it should include, you may need to set the ‘ARCHFLAGS’ environment variable explicitly:

sudo env ARCHFLAGS=‘-arch x86_64’ gem install pg

or, if you’re building from source:

rake compile ARCHFLAGS=“-arch x86_64”

Note that the recommended EnterpriseDB packages are correctly compiled as universal binaries, and don’t need any of these workarounds.