sudo: port: command not found; mac os x

Question

I am trying to build a todo list with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. In my rails application I add the gems I need and then type 'bundle' in my terminal. Everything works until:

Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
    /Users/Misha/.rbenv/versions/2.1.2/bin/ruby extconf.rb 
Building nokogiri using packaged libraries.
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libiconv is missing.  please visit http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html for help with installing dependencies.
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I go to the link provided and for mac it instructs to do the following commands:

sudo port install libxml2 libxslt

sudo gem install nokogiri

but then i get the command not found. I tried following a similar problem and solution:

sudo vi /etc/paths

Add 2 following lines:

/opt/local/bin

/opt/local/sbin

but still have the same problem.

Answer 1

I suspect sudo port install libxml2 libxslt is failing because you don't have the MacPorts package manager installed. However, I would install Homebrew instead (which is my personal package manager preference):

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"

Then continue with the instructions provided in the error message , substituting brew for sudo port :

brew install libxml2 libxslt

if that works, try:

sudo gem install nokogiri

Answer 2

Additionally to the answer of @thohl that I totally agree. Nokogiri sometimes is difficult to install. For that reason I keep the following recipe:

cd $( brew --prefix )
git checkout 763d946 Library/Formula/libxml2.rb
brew unlink libxml2
brew install libxml2 libxslt
git checkout master Library/Formula/libxml2.rb

ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future gem install nokogiri --verbose -- --with-xslt-dir=$( brew --prefix )/Cellar/libxslt/1.1.28 --with-iconv dir=$( brew --prefix )/Cellar/libiconv/1.14 --with-xml2-include=$( brew --prefix )/Cellar/libxml2/2.8.0/include/libxml2 --with-xml2-lib=$( brew --prefix )/homebrew/Cellar/libxml2/2.8.0/lib --use-system-libraries

These incantations made the trick in my case