ERROR: Error installing webrat: Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers.
One of my tasks today at work was to install numerous Ruby gems on a couple of our development servers. One of those gems was called webrat which is used for “Ruby acceptance testing and for web applications”. When I attempted to install webrat using “gem install webrat” from a Linux shell I received some errors which I describe below along with how to resolve the error in my scenario. It is likely for you to get similar errors however not the same exact errors so the key is analyzing the output of the “gem install” command to see if it will lead you to resolution.