Finally El Capitan arrived and I couldn’t be more eager to install it on my machine; as soon as I read on Twitter that it was available I jump to the AppStore and started the download process which seemed like a bad idea at the time:

Fortunately it only took 1 hour and 30 minutes to download and around 30 minutes to install :/ Which seems like forever.

With El Capitan now on my computer and ready to keep working I went to my project to install some fancy new pods of my own.

My «work configuration»

The way I use CocoaPods is via bundler. I specify a Gemfile with some CocoaPods plugins and some other gems that I usually use on my day to day coding life and execute everything CocoaPods related with bundle exec. Just like this:

$ bundle exec pod install

Enter nokogiri

For those of you that don’t know what Nokogiri is here’s an excerpt from their page:

Nokogiri (鋸) is an HTML, XML, SAX, and Reader parser. Among Nokogiri’s many features is the ability to search documents via XPath or CSS3 selectors. XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

Also if you didn’t know CocoaPods uses nokogiri as a dependency; this means that, that if you want to «install» CocoaPods you’ll end up installing nokogiri.

El Capitan vs. nokogiri => Fight!

From some time I’ve been facing the issue where I run:

$ bundle install

And nokogiri fails to build because is missing libxml2 path and that I should compile with system frameworks; which normally work, except that this time it completely failed to work and I was there unable to install my gems and/or run them using bundle exec stalling my work.

After checking the documentation I read that you could specify the path for some libraries, which wasn’t working for me :/

I was able to install the gem with gem install but not with bundler.

It didn’t took long for me to find a question on StackOverflow that addressed the same issue but for different versions of nokogiri and Xcode and it was just a matter of putting 2 + 2 together and finally my bundle install was successfully installing CocoaPods with nokogiri as a dependency.

Behold the «magic» command:

$ bundle config build.nokogiri --use-system-libraries=true --with-xml2-include=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.11.sdk/usr/include/libxml2

You can see that all it’s doing is specifying that nokogiri builds using system libraries and is also telling the full path for libxml2 under Xcode’s content folder.

Disclaimer

I honestly don’t know if this is something that happens solely on El Capitan; I’m guessing «no» and that this fix should work with any instance of OS X as long as you have Xcode, else you’ll have to specify a different path for your libxml2.