How to address problems with Ruby, cocoapods and react-native CLI on M1 MacBooks

You may have come across issues with installing podfile, using Homebrew, or using anything that might require Ruby on your M1 Mac or MacBook.

I’ve personally come across this issue when using react-native init to initialise a React Native application. It throws an error when trying to install the iOS dependencies because cocoapod needs Ruby to work properly.

Ruby doesn’t work properly from the get-go due to a problem with the universal binary that Apple is configured Ruby to use in Big Sur to work with the ARM architecture and it still recognising the host CPU as x86_64. Each binary needs a separate rbconfig.rb configuration file which is not supported by the rbconfig module and since Apple are intending to deprecate the Ruby binary there’s no real solution to this. Here’s a work around.

First things first: head to the Apple developer download page to download and install the latest build of Xcode and Command Line Tools.

Once they’re both installed, open a terminal window and install Rosetta2 with this command.

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate —install-rosetta —agree-to-license

Now we need to install a version of Homebrew that will work with ARM. Run this next.

arch -x86_64 /bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)”

You can now use brew in your terminal by running

arch -x86_64 brew install <PACKAGE NAME>

The next step is to install rbenv and ruby-build. Run this command.

arch -x86_64 brew install rbenv ruby-build

We now need to add some config to our .zshrc file, open it by running open ~/.zshrc in your terminal and then add the following to the bottom of the file:

export RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-openssl-dir=$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)"
export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"

If you don’t have Zsh already configured then follow this guide.

We’ve now completed the initial setup and can get into fixing the actual problem with Ruby. At this…