Nokogiri installation fails -libxml2 is missing

You may actually need to install both of these packages

sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

First, install the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev libxml2-dev

If you still receive the error, you may be missing a compiler toolchain:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

You'll get the "libxml2 is missing" error if you're missing a build toolchain (at least I ran into this issue on Debian Lenny).

The Nokogiri build test-compiles a libxml2 header file to verify that it is present, however, it doesn't differentiate between "libxml2 is missing" and "a compiler to test libxml2 is missing".

In Mac OS X (Mavericks), installing the libraries with brew and setting NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=1 before installing the gem did the trick for me.

Summarising:

• If previously installed, uninstall the gem:

  gem uninstall nokogiri

• Use Homebrew to install libxml2, libxslt and libiconv:

  brew install libxml2 libxslt libiconv

• Install the gem specifying the paths to the libraries to be linked against:

  NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES=1 gem install nokogiri -- --use-system-libraries --with-iconv-dir="$(brew --prefix libiconv)" --with-xml2-config="$(brew --prefix libxml2)/bin/xml2-config" --with-xslt-config="$(brew --prefix libxslt)/bin/xslt-config"