Ruby 1.9.2 Segmentation Fault and OpenSSL

In one of my current project, whenever I ran a rake task that did a net/http request it was causing segmentation faults.

bundle exec rake test:task
/Users/cirish/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p290/lib/ruby/1.9.1/net/http.rb:678: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.9.2 (2011-06-30 patchlevel 290) [i686-darwin10.8.0]

And it seems whenever I get a segmentation fault the first place I need to look is at OpenSSL. I’ve had similar problems with seg faults and openssl in the past, namely this OpenSSL Bus Error that I was getting on Ruby 1.8.7.

If you read that post you’ll see this happened because I use MacPorts and have OpenSSL installed through it, in addition to a local OS X version. To get Ruby to be happy, you have to point your Ruby install to the correct version at installation time. So remove the bad install

rvm remove ruby-1.9.2

And reinstall

rvm install ruby-1.9.2 --with-openssl-dir=/opt/local --with-iconv-dir=$rvm_path/usr

Which I forgot to do with my Ruby 1.9.2 install after upgrading OS X versions. That last bit about iconv isn’t directly related, but I have inconv package installed to RVM, you can read about that here RVM Iconv.

Also, this Phusion blog post REE 1-8-7-2011-03-released mentions problems with OpenSSL and MacPorts. Moral of the story… use HomeBrew? Dunno, but I’ll probably start using it when I upgrade my laptop.

Comments

Sugel September 16, 2011 at 9:01 pm

For me the fix for this with an RVM version of ruby is to install it with the RVM OpenSSL package .In particular I used the following to install ruby 1.8.7-p174 .rvm package install iconv.rvm package install openssl.rvm install 1.8.7-p174 --with-openssl-dir HOME .rvm usr --with-iconv-dir rvm path usr...

Peter Degen-Portnoy November 17, 2011 at 5:47 pm

Chris, thanks for posting this. After wading through a fair number of bug reports, your instructions were clear, concise and correct!

Cynical Grinch December 5, 2011 at 1:31 pm

Your delete command is wrong. It should be: $ rvm remove ruby-1.9.2

Irish December 5, 2011 at 2:06 pm

Yep, thanks for the catch, post updated.

Tim December 21, 2011 at 3:04 pm

Does this work with Homebrew? According to https://github.com/carlhuda/bundler/issues/1596 we need openssl 1.0, but it looks like Homebrew only has openssl 0.9.8r

Irish December 21, 2011 at 3:12 pm

Hey Tim, I'm not sure as I'm not currently using Homebrew. From the sound of that ticket, perhaps OpenSSL 1.0 is only a requirement of Ruby 1.9.3... But I'm not really sure.

Tim December 21, 2011 at 3:24 pm

No problem. I got it working with macports :-) Thanks for the blog post!

Mark Lanett December 27, 2011 at 5:23 pm

Thanks for the tips. This is my clean install: 1 2 3 4 5 6 export PATH=/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:$HOME/.rvm/bin # keep MacPorts out of PATH during compile rvm pkg install iconv rvm pkg install openssl rvm install ruby-1.9.2 --with-openssl-dir=~/.rvm/usr --with-iconv-dir=~/.rvm/usr rvm 1.9.2 ruby -ropenssl -e 'p OpenSSL::Digest::Digest.new("sha256")' # verify OpenSSL works

Tim January 13, 2012 at 1:38 pm

Thank you Mark. That saved me a lot of time and worked on Mac OSX 10.7.2

Francisco January 25, 2012 at 1:35 pm

Thank you very much Irish! Worked perfect for me!

Dano Lee January 27, 2012 at 1:17 am

rvm install ruby-1.9.3-head -C --with-gcc=clang,--with-openssl-dir=~/.rvm/usr,--with-iconv-dir=~/.rvm/usr the above worked for me. Thanks!

Derek February 11, 2012 at 2:23 am

This works with Ruby 1.9.3 on Snow Leopard. Thanks Mark!

Dan Cartoon February 11, 2012 at 12:58 pm

This worked for me as well. Thanks!

Danroux February 23, 2012 at 6:40 am

Thank you for your solution, this also helped me.

Ethan March 1, 2012 at 7:54 pm

On my Mac OS 10.7.3 I was able to install iconv and openssl but it wouldn't run the command to install Ruby... $ rvm install ruby-1.9.2 –with-openssl-dir=~/.rvm/usr –with-iconv-dir=~/.rvm/usr Unrecognized command line argument(s): '–with-openssl-dir=~/.rvm/usr ' ( see: 'rvm usage' ) However, just installing the packages seems to have corrected the OpenSSL problem. If I just install Ruby normally without the options, then OpenSSL appears to work... $ ruby -ropenssl -e 'p OpenSSL::Digest::Digest.new("sha256")' # verify OpenSSL works #

Ethan March 1, 2012 at 7:55 pm

The blogging software ate the last line but, the point was that the command ran without an error.

Eddroid March 13, 2012 at 4:09 pm

I actually fixed this problem by downgrading OpenSSL. I had already installed the MacPorts one, but I built ruby 1.9.3-p125 without MacPorts and the segfault on https URL requests went away. See https://github.com/carlhuda/bundler/issues/1596

tommyfun April 14, 2012 at 2:05 pm

This is driving me crazy. I shouldn't have to install rvm to get ruby to build correctly. There are so many rails developers on os x, I can't believe this is not fixed yet.

Irish April 16, 2012 at 4:49 pm

You shouldn't have to, you just need to make sure you're pointing to the correct openssl when you install it. RVM is just for more convenience.

Jamie McDonald June 25, 2012 at 1:45 pm

Thanks for the solution to this, really helpful post!

Brian Pfeil October 4, 2012 at 1:15 pm

Best Post of the Year Award!! Thanks you so much. I spent hours trying to figure this out.