Rails 4: Error when installing tiny_tds gem?

Question

I have developed a rails web project with Ruby v2 and Rails v4. It was perfectly working in my current system and when i tried to run this project in another Linux machine (Ubuntu 12.4 ) i am getting a Tidy_tds error . This error is showing at the time of `bundle install` , Error Details below ``` Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /home/action/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.1/bin/ruby extconf.rb checking for iconv_open() in iconv.h... yes checking for sybfront.h... no ----- freetds is missing. 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-lib=${opt-dir}/lib --with-make-prog --without-make-prog --srcdir=. --curdir --ruby=/home/action/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.1/bin/ruby --enable-lookup --disable-lookup --with-iconv-dir --without-iconv-dir --wi…

Accepted Answer

Looks like you don't have freetds installed on this machine:

```
sudo apt-get install freetds-dev
```

If you see the details of the freetds-dev package you will see it has the missing file `sybfront.h`

There is no gem that I know for `freetds` and building the `tiny_tds` gem requires it to compile. However it should be possible for you build your own version of the gem using `MiniPortile`.

Rather than using the normal `gem install` mechanism you need to clone the `tiny_tds` from GitHub and then build a native gem for your environment. This process will include downloading a specific version of `freetds` which is used to compile the gem against.

This should get you round the problem of not being able to install `freetds-dev` package, but does have the disadvantage that if `tiny_tds` gem is updated in the future you will need to repeat this process each time - you can't simply take advantage of `bundle update`.

The steps you need to follow are detailed here.

Rails 4: Error when installing tiny_tds gem?

Solution

Problem