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After getting rails installed on mac and Rails through Mongrel on Media Temple and running through the getting started with rails guide I was having issues installing MySQL ruby gem.

When I created a new rails app with rails blog -d mysql, it complained about not having mysql gem installed. Then that iis hwere I got an error installing the gem.

gem install mysql

Here is the error I was getting:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while…
ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lm… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lz… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lsocket… no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no
checking for main() in -lnsl… yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient… no

Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/rubygems/gems/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/rubygems/gems/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out

On Mac I fixed it by adding mysql config paramater.

sudo gem install mysql — —with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

On the Media Temple (dv) I fixed the error by using a different path to the mysql_config.

gem install mysql — —with-mysql-config=/usr/lib/mysql/mysql_config