Problem with sqlite when installing the taps ruby gem on Mac OS X

Just worked my way through one of those installation problems where trying to install A fails because B is missing and trying to install B fails because... and so on.

1: Trying to push a database to the Heroku hosting service failed because I did not have the 'taps' gem installed
2: 'gem install taps' failed because it couldn't compile a component that interacts with sqlite databases. I'm not using sqlite but there is no way to skip this part of the code - hmm...
3: Mac OS X has sqlite installed by default (or at least with Xcode installed)
4: Explicitly telling taps where to find the lib and include files didn't fix it

So the problem lay in my sqlite installation

Lots of mentions of the issue on Google - some of which said to install a new version with MacPorts

In the past I have found MacPorts to be a very frustrating experience - just wanting to install a single library has led to literally hours of watching it fetching and installing all sorts of apparent dependencies. So I tend to just get the source code for whatever I want and compile it manually, but that can be a pain in and of itself.

I've heard very good things about Homebrew as a MacPorts replacement so I figured I should take a look.

1. Set up a 'staff' group so that you can install code without having to sudo everything
2. Get Homebrew
3. Install your library

$ sudo dscl /Local/Default -append /Groups/staff GroupMembership $USER
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"
$ brew install sqlite

Simple... Brilliant... I'm sold...

Homebrew installs code in /usr/local/Cellar by default so I need to tell the ruby gems where to find that - and somewhere along the line I saw a sqlite ruby gem. So I figured I should install that first as a check that things are working before trying 'taps'.

$ gem install sqlite3 -- --with-sqlite3-include=/usr/local/Cellar/sqlite/3.7.5/include \
                                            --with-sqlite3-lib=/usr/local/Cellar/sqlite/3.7.5/lib
$ gem install taps

It worked...
You may see mention of a sqlite3-ruby gem. That is now called sqlite3 - it's the same thing.

And finally I can run '$ heroku db:push' and send my database to my Heroku app.

Phew...