mimemagic breaking bundle install

Posted by Cristian Livadaru on Wednesday, May 18, 2022

This is no new issue and most likely it will only be relevant to older rails projects, but since I faced the same issue again and meanwhile forgot what it was about and how it should be fixed, here a note to self.

For more details and an appropriate header image for this subject, check out Christine’s Post on this issue: What’s up with mimemagic breaking everything?

The Error

While running bundle install

Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
current directory: /bundle/gems/mimemagic-0.4.3/ext/mimemagic
...
Could not find MIME type database in the following locations:
...
Ensure you have either installed the shared-mime-info package for your distribution, or obtain a version of freedesktop.org.xml and set FREEDESKTOP_MIME_TYPES_PATH to the location of that file.

The answer is already in the error message, you need to install shared-mime-info which I did add to the Dockerfile

RUN apt-get update -qq && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -qq --no-install-recommends \
    vim cmake cron shared-mime-info && \