rails + MySQL on OSX: Library not loaded: libmysqlclient.18.dylib
While the title of this question describes precisely the problem I encountered, the circumstances are different from those described in the previous answers, and so was the solution.
In my case (El Capitan, mysql installed via homebrew), a brew update && brew upgrade
caused the mysql package to be upgraded to 5.7.10 (from 5.6.x).
The upgrade caused libmysqlclient.18.dylib
to be replaced with libmysqlclient.20.dylib
, but the mysql2
gem was still relying on the former.
To fix the problem I did: gem uninstall mysql2 && gem install mysql2
Please note that similar problems can occur with different homebrew-managed libraries (see my own answer to this, for example)
In El Capitan I got ln: /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib: Operation not permitted
In El Capitan /usr/lib/
now has a restricted flag and can't be written to without disabling security so I just put the link in /usr/local/lib
instead.
sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib
Rails server is running fine again.
The solution is pretty easy; Add the library path in your ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile file:
MYSQL=/usr/local/mysql/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$MYSQL
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
If it is still not working (this work for me):
sudo ln -s /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib
There are many blogs with install_name_tool
, which won't work for me because I'm on OSX Lion:
sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/bin/indexer
sudo install_name_tool -change libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.18.dylib /usr/local/bin/search