What made Lita on Edge so controversial? Get the inside story behind the drama.

Alright, let’s talk about getting Lita up and running. Not in some fancy cloud setup, just right here, locally. I sometimes call this kind of thing getting it running “on edge” because honestly, setting up dev environments can feel like teetering on the brink sometimes, you know?

So, the goal was simple: get a basic Lita bot working on my machine for some tinkering. First step, check the basics. I already had Ruby installed, but you always gotta check the version. Lita can be picky. Made sure I had `bundler` too. Then, the usual start: gem install lita. That part went smooth enough.

Next, I generated a new bot project. lita new mylittlebot. It spat out the standard files. Looked good. Changed directory into mylittlebot. Now for the moment of truth: lita start. And… nope. Failed. As expected, really. Some kind of error message popped up.

Hitting the Wall

It complained about dependencies. It’s always the dependencies, isn’t it? Opened up the Gemfile. Standard stuff in there. The error message wasn’t super clear, but pointed towards running bundle install first. Fair enough. Tried that.

More red text. This time, a specific gem failed to install. Something about not being able to build native extensions. We’ve all been there. Sometimes it’s Nokogiri, that classic troublemaker. This time it was something else, but the same kind of problem.

Figuring It Out

Okay, time to troubleshoot. Here’s what I tried:

• System Libraries: First thought, maybe I was missing some development headers or libraries on my machine. Used my package manager (apt, brew, whatever you use) to install a few likely candidates, like things related to XML or SSL. Ran bundle install again. Still failed.
• Updating Gems: Maybe just running bundle update would resolve some hidden conflicts? Worth a shot. Ran it. It churned for a while. Nope, same error at the end.
• Specific Gem Install: Tried installing the problematic gem directly with gem install the-problem-gem -v '*'. Sometimes that gives a clearer error message. It did, but still pointed to a build failure.
• Searching Around: Copied the error message and searched online. Found lots of people with similar issues. Suggestions ranged from changing Ruby versions using RVM or rbenv (felt like overkill) to setting specific compiler flags during installation.
• Compiler Flags: Tried the flag approach. Something like bundle config *-problem-gem --with-some-option=/path/to/lib. Fiddled with a few variations based on the search results. Still no luck. This was getting annoying.

The Breakthrough

I stopped and just stared at the error message again. Read it really carefully. Sometimes you miss the obvious hint. It wasn’t just a generic “build failed”. There was a hint about the compiler version or maybe some specific tool it couldn’t find. On my system, I realized my C++ compiler or build tools might have been updated recently.

The fix turned out to be simpler than I thought, but took a while to find. I needed to tell Bundler to use a specific compiler or maybe link against a library explicitly. I ended up setting an environment variable right before running the install command. Something like:

export SOME_ENV_VAR=/path/to/correct/tool

Then, I ran bundle install one more time.

And just like that, it worked! The problematic gem installed. The rest followed. Felt like a huge relief after banging my head against it.

Up and Running

Finally, I could run lita start. And boom, the bot started up in the console. Ready for commands.

So, yeah. Getting “lita on edge”, just running locally, wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Took some digging, some guessing, and carefully reading error messages. It’s often the case with these frameworks that rely on system dependencies and native extensions. But, persistence paid off. Now the fun part can begin – actually making the bot do something useful. Or amusing. We’ll see.