Random headache #57 – Rails 4 and Nokogiri on Windows

So I’m currently working on a rails-based internal app for a company I occasionally do some work for (and often, wish I didn’t), and for one reason or another I’m stuck developing on a Windows box. I won’t go into the reasons for this right now (suffice it to say that I blame Broadcom. Or Sony. I’m not sure…) but it is what it is – I’m stuck with Windows on x86-64.

The stack in use here is Rails 4.0 on Ruby 2.0, which is apparently known to be problematic on 64-bit Windows, and it seems there have been some previous problems with Nokogiri added into the mix. I’ve spent a few hours now chasing this one down, and googling around has turned up quite a few people experiencing similar issues. The problem is that I could not get Bundler to use the (already installed) fat binary Nokogiri 1.6.1. No matter what I tried at the (braindead) windows command prompt, it would always download the source gem and try to compile it. Which didn’t work. If you’ve ever tried to get a working libxml2 build going on Windows, you’ll understand why I wasn’t prepared to push it. I just wanted to use the pre-built binary provided by the nice folks at Nokogiri.

After putting up with an annoying develop/test cycle involving pushing every change over to an old (Linux) laptop, running tests, and then coming back to the Windows machine for further coding, I finally found a way to make it work on Windows, thanks to a read through the Gemfile manual. It turns out I can unpack the binary gem into a local path within my app, using the :path option. So I unpacked the binary gem into a new directory, and then modified the app’s Gemfile thusly:

# Workaround windows issue (quelle suprise) with nokogiri on win64
# Note: We don't actually require nokogiri (which is why there's no platform agnostic
# gem line for it) - it's only required by the other dependencies...
#
# Also, since we wouldn't dream of deploying production on a windows box, this is
# a development/test only dependency...
group :development, :test do
  gem 'nokogiri', '1.6.1', path: File.join('.', 'localgems', 'nokogiri-1.6.1.beta.1.mingw.1-x64-mingw32'), platforms: :x64_mingw
end

With this in place, I was finally able to run bundle install all the way to the end. I did run up against one other problem (an execjs runtime error, which pops up because Windows doesn’t support v8, and so therubyracer is incompatible too), which I patched up by following these instructions (this is for execjs 2.02 – YMMV with other versions, obviously). After that, I was able to run my specs, and even start the rails server locally.

Job done! Now I can get back to writing some actual code…

Edit: After sorting this, I did a bundle upgrade and moved to rails 4.0.1. Predictably enough, everything broke again, with all kinds of exceptions about missing timezone info. When the obvious quick-fix didn’t work, I gave up and moved back to 4.0.0. I’ve banged my head against this particular brick wall enough for one day!