Rails | Will writes

Feb 17 2020

Error installing libv8 on Mac OS Catalina

I got an error installing the libv8 gem on Catalina:

$ gem install libv8 -v '3.16.14.19' Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing libv8: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.


    current directory: /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/ext/libv8

/Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/bin/ruby -r ./siteconf20200217-34155-18bho1v.rb extconf.rb

creating Makefile

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/disable-building-tests.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/disable-werror-on-osx.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/disable-xcode-debugging.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/do-not-imply-vfp3-and-armv7.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/do-not-use-MAP_NORESERVE-on-freebsd.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/do-not-use-vfp2.patch

Applying /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/patches/fPIC-for-static.patch

Compiling v8 for x64

Using python 2.7.16

Using compiler: c++ (clang version 11.0.0)

Unable to find a compiler officially supported by v8.

It is recommended to use GCC v4.4 or higher

Beginning compilation. This will take some time.

Building v8 with env CXX=c++ LINK=c++  /usr/bin/make x64.release ARFLAGS.target=crs werror=no

GYP_GENERATORS=make \

	build/gyp/gyp --generator-output="out" build/all.gyp \

	              -Ibuild/standalone.gypi --depth=. \

	              -Dv8_target_arch=x64 \

	              -S.x64  -Dv8_enable_backtrace=1 -Dv8_can_use_vfp2_instructions=true -Darm_fpu=vfpv2 -Dv8_can_use_vfp3_instructions=true -Darm_fpu=vfpv3 -Dwerror=''

  CXX(target) /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/vendor/v8/out/x64.release/obj.target/preparser_lib/src/allocation.o

warning: include path for stdlibc++ headers not found; pass '-stdlib=libc++' on the command line to use the libc++ standard library instead [-Wstdlibcxx-not-found]

In file included from ../src/allocation.cc:33:

../src/utils.h:33:10: fatal error: 'climits' file not found

#include

         ^~~~~~~~~

1 warning and 1 error generated.

make[1]: *** [/Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/vendor/v8/out/x64.release/obj.target/preparser_lib/src/allocation.o] Error 1

make: *** [x64.release] Error 2

/Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/ext/libv8/location.rb:36:in `block in verify_installation!': libv8 did not install properly, expected binary v8 archive '/Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/vendor/v8/out/x64.release/obj.target/tools/gyp/libv8_base.a'to exist, but it was not found (Libv8::Location::Vendor::ArchiveNotFound)

	from /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/ext/libv8/location.rb:35:in `each'

	from /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/ext/libv8/location.rb:35:in `verify_installation!'

	from /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19/ext/libv8/location.rb:26:in `install!'

	from extconf.rb:7:in `'
extconf failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/gems/libv8-3.16.14.19 for inspection. Results logged to /Users/will/.rbenv/versions/2.4.5/lib/ruby/gems/2.4.0/extensions/x86_64-darwin-19/2.4.0/libv8-3.16.14.19/gem_make.out

The Solution

The solution was as follows:

$ brew install v8@3.15 $ gem install libv8 -v '3.16.14.19' -- --with-system-v8 Building native extensions with: '--with-system-v8' This could take a while... Successfully installed libv8-3.16.14.19 1 gem installed

Apr 23 2012

1 Comment

Rails, Ruby

Railsberry animated gifs

I put up some photos of Railsberry here, but Flickr doesn’t work with animated gifs, so here they are. Click the images to get the animated versions.

Riding the Railsberry Unicorn:

Jon Leighton getting closer:

Josh Kalderimis misbehaving:

Tagged railsberry

Feb 13 2011

4 Comments

finder, Programming, Rails

Rails 2 -> 3 undefined method `html_safe’ for nil:NilClass error

I am converting the Recycling Group Finder site from Rails 2 to Rails 3 and though it has mostly gone to plan I was temporarily held up by this error which I was getting on some pages:

The error was hard to track down as the error message wasn’t very descriptive, but in the end it turned out to be caused by a comment. I am using content_for blocks to generate sections of page content and for a long section I had added a comment to the end of the block to help be know which block was closing:

It turns out that this ‘# some_section’ comment was the problem, possibly because of the change to erubis in Rails 3. Removing the comment caused the page to start working again:

I hope this page helps short-cut the debugging for anyone else that is bitten by this issue.

Tagged content_for, erubis, yield

Jun 15 2009

2 Comments

Programming, Rails, Ruby, Web

Blocking Internet Explorer 5.5

IE 5.5 is dead. The number of people using it are tiny, at least according to the stats on the most popular sites I run. Here are the numbers.

Jokes-o-matic

Has a larger proportion of Firefox users than Internet Explorer users due to the high level of traffic from some social bookmarking sites, meaning a more web-savvy crowd who are more likely to be using alternative browsers:

jokes-o-matic.com browser breakdown

The level of IE usage is still pretty high though, but even so only a single hit from IE 5.5 recently:

jokes-o-matic.com IE versions

Recycling Group Finder

A much more broad and ‘average’ user base with Internet Explorer dominant:

Recycling Group Finder browser breakdown

Still, only 6 Internet Explorer hits recently, a tiny proportion of overall visits:

Recycling Group Finder IE versions

What does this mean?

Yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5

These statistics, and others I have seen suggest that almost no-one uses Internet Explorer 5.5 or below any more. The small minority that do must be used to the internet breaking in unique and interesting ways due to the lack of support for more recent developments in CSS and really bad Javascript support (see right for yahoo.com as seen in Internet Explorer 5.5). I predict that a fair number of sites just don’t work in any usable way on anything less than Internet Explorer 6.

Time is money

Designing for multiple browsers takes time. The more browsers you need to support the more time you need to spend supporting them.

A recent project I worked on required a redesign of the site from the ground-up (aswell as a bunch of other stuff) and making the site work in any version of Internet Explorer lower than 6 just wasn’t worth the time, and therefore money, put into it. The return just wasn’t there and I decided that IE 5.5 was gone, dead, obsolete and I wasn’t going to try and mangle the design to work in it. Rather than just display a really crappy looking site to the user I decided I would let them know via a short and to-the-point message that their browser was not up to displaying the site and directing them to upgrade to a new version of their browser.

Give them the good news

Message displayed to all users visiting project in anything below IE 6

But how to do this? The site was developed in Ruby on Rails and I’d heard of a neat gem called rack-noie6 that provides a piece of Rack middleware that blocks Internet Explorer 6 and below, but that isn’t going to work in most cases. Hard as it may be to make your site look good in Internet Explorer 6 you can see from the stats above there’s still a large proportion of users using it and to turn them away would be crazy, at least while the pool of IE 6 users out there is still so large.

So a quick fork and patch later (github we <3 you so much) and the new noie6 was accepting an option for a minimum version of Internet Explorer it should accept instead of just rigidly blocking version 6 and below. Configuration is really simple:

Now any users visiting the site in anything below Internet Explorer 6 gets the message above helpfully directing them to update their browser. Not bad for a two line config update.

Tagged internet explorer, rack, Rails, Ruby

Mar 07 2009

1 Comment

Rails, Ruby, sysadmin, Web

Rewriting URL params in nginx

I came across this problem recently, a customer was moving to Ruby on Rails from another framework/language (.NET I think) and needed to re-write a bunch of URLs. Some needed the query parameters rewriting too. One example was rewriting the old search path, so the old URL:

http://somedomain.com/OldSearchPath.aspx?qry=things&page=4

would become:

http://somedomain.com/search?query=things&page=4

This should be fairly simple except for the qry parameter needed to be changed to query. A bit of googling didn’t turn up much but with some experimentation I came up with this using the pre-populated nginx $args variable:

location /OldSearchPath.aspx {
  if ($args ~* qry=(.+)) {
    set $args query=$1;
  }
}
rewrite ^.+$ /search redirect;

It even leaves the other parameters intact, so the pagination will still work.

Tagged nginx, rewrite

Will writes

It's all good

Category Archives: Rails