I found the easiest combination was the following:

• MySQL for Mac OS X (x86)


• Ruby One-Click Installer for Tiger


• RubyGems (installed as part of the One-Click Installer) for the MySQL library

First Karen installed the three items included in the MySQL Mac OS X package: the server, preference pane, and startup support. She doesn't need to run the server, but installing it creates the /usr/local/mysql directory with all of the client-side drivers. The preference pane and startup support are just there to make things easier for her to work with.

Next, she installed the One-Click Installer. Mac OS X comes with Ruby already, but only the base interpreter. I couldn't find gem anywhere, and the One-Click Installer includes a bunch of stuff including RubyGems. So now Karen has a more up-to-date version of Ruby installed in /usr/local.

At this point, Ruby 1.8.6 is installed with RubyGems 0.9.4. Typing which ruby in Terminal showed that the /usr/local/bin/ruby executable was already being picked up instead of the one that came with Mac OS X. Now we needed to install the MySQL libraries so she could write scripts to interact with her database. This is done using RubyGems at /usr/local/bin/gem.

karen$ sudo /usr/local/bin/gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

The first time, this returned an error about not being able to find the mysql gem. However, running the same command a second time it worked just fine and asked which version of the mysql gem to install.

Select which gem to install for your platform
1. mysql 2.7.3 (mswin32)
2. mysql 2.7.1 (mswin32)
3. mysql 2.7 (ruby)
4. mysql 2.6 (ruby)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation

Karen picked #4, and after a short while it reported success. However, all is not well yet because there is a bug in the mysql.bundle file that was created by the installation. It references the MySQL dynamic library as /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib when the correct path is /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib. Note the extra mysql in the incorrect path.

To fix this, you need to run the install_name_tool which can be used to change the name of dynamic libraries in a Mach-O binary. As it turns out, there will actually be two mysql.bundle files created as a result of the gem installation. I believe /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/mysql.bundle may be a temporary one, and /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle (inside the lib directory) may be the one used during execution. However, just to be safe, since the current working directory appears to be used when Ruby is looking for libraries, I had Karen change the reference in both files.

sudo install_name_tool -change /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/mysql.bundle
sudo install_name_tool -change /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.15.dylib /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle

Now everything is done and you can use the mysql library from within your Ruby scripts. However, you need to require RubyGems first, otherwise it won't find the mysql.bundle file.

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

require "rubygems"

require "mysql"

Unfortunately, after doing all of this, Karen was unable to connect to her database because it does not accept remote connections. :(

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