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Shannon Crabill

Let me tell you, I had been avoiding making this update for months. It seemed hard and scary and I was afraid I would break something. But you know what?

It was kind of a mess, but not as much of a mess as I thought it would be.

There are a lot of tutorials on switching your Ruby on Rails (Rails) database from sqlite3 to postgres. However, I did run into problems that were not covered in the tutorial I was reading at the time and have to find another one or a one-off solution.

There may be others who run into issues like I have, so I wanted to document the issues I had and possible fixes.

Postgres just won’t install

??‍♀️

The first step in most tutorials I followed was to remove the sqlite3 from the Gemfile in your backend and replace it with Postgres.

In my Gemfile, it looked like this.

gem 'sqlite3', '~> 1.4'

I’d replace it with this.

gem 'pg'

Then run bundle install to install the gem.

Except, it just wouldn’t install. I kept getting a wall or red or yellow console logs, starting with something like this.

Failed to build native extensions...

Yikes.

I tried doing a global install of the gem, but got a similar error.

After several months of avoiding trying to find a solution for this, I asked for help and got a link to a Stackoverflow question that echoed the same issue I was having.

Installing PG gem on OS X - failure to build native extension

And the most upvoted answer to install postgres with homebrew worked for me!

Here are the steps.

  • Install another build of Xcode Tools (typing brew update in the terminal will prompt you to update the Xcode build tools)
  • brew update
  • brew install postgresql

After that, running bundle install ran successfully.

Bundle complete! 13 Gemfile dependencies, 58 gems now installed.