Story of a laptop upgrade

After nearly six years, I've finally upgraded my personal computer! I waited long, but I wanted to be sure the reviews were favorable enough before buying. It's a big investment!

I decided to go with the 16 in Macbook Pro laptop with the Apple M1 chip that came out this year. So far, I'm loving it! It's so quiet and fast!

Of course, setting everything up in a new machine, with this brand new chip and MacOS Monterey, was a bit daunting. I wanted to install all the necessary gems and libraries that I use for development, but I had heard that some things about the installation process had changed.

Fortunately for me, I found this very useful guide to installing Homebrew. It details all the recent changes regarding to where the files are now installed in these new machines. I highly recommend reading it before you start a new installation. Once I had Homebrew and Xcode installed, I followed along the instructions from this guide from GoRails to install the correct version of Ruby, Node, Yarn and other gems and packages, as needed, in order to be able to create and run a Rails application in development.

Most of the installation went smoothly, as predicted by the guides. The only one hiccup I found was when attempting to create a new Rails application using MySQL for the database. Bundler failed to install the mysql2 gem.

An error occurred while installing mysql2 (0.5.3), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install mysql2 -v '0.5.3' --source 'https://rubygems.org/'` succeeds before bundling.

Examining the error closely, it appeared to indicate that the library zstd was not being found.

ld: library not found for -lzstd

In my case, it wasn't so much that the library was not installed, but it seems it was not being linked from the correct path, so the solution was to install mysql2 indicating the correct path to the library.

gem install mysql2 -v '0.5.3' -- --with-opt-dir=$(brew --prefix openssl) --with-ldflags=-L/opt/homebrew/Cellar/zstd/1.5.0/lib

Once that was done, I was able to finish installing all the necessary gems for my Rails application. Please notice, if you run into this same error and decide to give the command above a try, make sure to substitute for your correct version of mysql2 and the path to the zstd library in your machine, since they may not match mine.