How to install older Ruby versions(2.x) on Mac M1 without using arch x86_64

Introduction

After spending hours of searching different solutions on the internet for installing older version of ruby (2.5.x, 2.6.x etc ) on Mac M1, I finally figured out the solution and decided to document it by writing a blog.

Pre-Requirements

Make sure you have following installed on your Mac M1

• Update your Mac OS
• Homebrew

  /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
  

• rbenv (Should work for rvm also)

  brew install rbenv
  

• Make sure that you have latest xcode command line tools

  xcode-select --install
  

  if the above fails, then:

  sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
  xcode-select --install
  

Steps to Reproduce The Problem

The problem occurs if you try to install an older version with Ruby.

rbenv install 2.6.2

Error:

- BUILD FAILED (macOS 12.1 using ruby-build 20210707)
- Inspect or clean up the working tree at `/var/folders/.....`

Solution

Try installing the ruby version with this variable RUBY_CFLAGS="-Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration"

RUBY_CFLAGS="-Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration" rbenv install 2.6.2

This should work fine!

Other Installations

After this, install other dependencies normally using brew. For eg: postgresql I installed postgresql@10 which was required for the project.

brew install postgresql@10

The end of success clearly states that you have to do some entries in your bash/zsh file

If you need to have postgresql@10 first in your PATH, run:
  echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@10/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

For compilers to find postgresql@10 you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@10/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@10/include"

For pkg-config to find postgresql@10 you may need to set:
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@10/lib/pkgconfig"


To restart postgresql@10 after an upgrade:
  brew services restart postgresql@10
Or, if you don't want/need a background service you can just run:
  /opt/homebrew/opt/postgresql@10/bin/postgres -D /opt/homebrew/var/postgresql@10

Do these changes and then go to your project and set the ruby version for the project:

rbenv local 2.6.2

Check if the ruby version is correct:

ruby -v # should output whatever version you had set in the previous step.

The next step is to install the bundle

bundle install

During the installation, I got an error while installing http-parser. The error message looked like this:

Caused by:
LoadError: cannot load such file -- 2.6/ffi_c


Caused by:
LoadError: cannot load such file -- ffi-compiler/compile_task

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

rake failed, exit code 1

Gem files will remain installed in /Users/Dollar/.rbenv/versions/2.6.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/gems/http-parser-1.2.3 for inspection.
Results logged to /Users/Dollar/.rbenv/versions/2.6.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.6.0/extensions/-darwin-21/2.6.0/http-parser-1.2.3/gem_make.out

An error occurred while installing http-parser (1.2.3), and Bundler cannot continue.
Make sure that `gem install http-parser -v '1.2.3' --source 'https://rubygems.org/'` succeeds before bundling.

In Gemfile:
  elastic-apm was resolved to 3.15.1, which depends on
    http was resolved to 4.4.1, which depends on
      http-parser

The error message clearly states that the reason

LoadError: cannot load such file -- ffi-compiler/compile_task

I rectified the problem through installing ffi compiler for ruby platform using the following command:

gem install ffi --platform=ruby

Now, try running

bundle install

Conclusion

Things should work now! Feel free to drop a suggestion or any feedback if this process can be further improved.