idb has some prerequisites. As it turns out, things like ruby and Qt are difficult to bundle into a stand-alone installer. While idb itself can easily be installed via Ruby Gems, you need to have some additional software first:

Prerequisites

Ruby Environment

Ruby 2.0 does not work properly due to issues with qtbindings. idb requires a valid ruby 2.1+ installation and it is recommended to install the used ruby using RVM due to issues with qtbindings.

Important Note: Shared library support is required! This is the default for many system rubies, but if you install a ruby via rvm or similar, you need to do one of the following:

Under rvm use rvm install 2.4.1 --enable-shared when installing ruby.

Under ruby-install / chruby use -- --enable-shared when installing ruby.

Under ruby-build / rbenv with ruby-build use CONFIGURE_OPTS=--enable-shared [command] when installing Ruby.

Install Other Prerequisites:

For OS X:

Homebrew removed Qt4 from the main repositories and only provides Qt5 libraries. Unfortunately, there are no Qt5 bindings for ruby available as of yet. The following will add a repository containing Qt4 libraries. Thanks to moloch- for posting the instructions on Github.

1 2 3 brew tap cartr/qt4 brew tap-pin cartr/qt4 brew install cartr/qt4/qt@4

Install the remaining dependencies

1 brew install cmake usbmuxd libimobiledevice

Building nokogiri will likely require a working XCode installation:

1 xcode-select --install

If you run into problems compiling nokogiri upon installation of idb, check http://www.nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html

For Ubuntu:

1 apt-get install cmake libqt4-dev git-core libimobiledevice-utils libplist-utils usbmuxd libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev -y

Installing idb