08 February 2026
I was recently deploying a rails app on an Ampere Arm instance which used Tailwind 4.1.18. During the rails assets precompile build step, tailwindcss failed with:
Command failed with SIGABRT (signal 6) (core dumped): /usr/local/bundle/gems/tailwindcss-ruby-4.1.18-aarch64-linux-gnu/exe/aarch64-linux-gnu/tailwindcss
#16 1.394 /usr/local/bundle/gems/tailwindcss-rails-4.4.0/lib/tasks/build.rake:11:in 'Kernel#system'
#16 1.394 /usr/local/bundle/gems/tailwindcss-rails-4.4.0/lib/tasks/build.rake:11:in 'block (2 levels) in <main>'
#16 1.394 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/rake-13.3.1/lib/rake/task.rb:281:in 'block in Rake::Task#execute'
#16 1.394 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/rake-13.3.1/lib/rake/task.rb:281:in 'Array#each'
#16 1.394 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/rake-13.3.1/lib/rake/task.rb:281:in 'Rake::Task#execute'
#16 1.394 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/4.0.0/gems/rake-13.3.1/lib/rake/task.rb:219:in 'block in Rake::Task#invoke_with_call_chain'
...
I didn't dig into it much further to figure out why, but searching around I did not find any more reports of this problem. I did find a workaround, which was to build with the node version of tailwind instead. My deployment was all in Docker, so I first added these environment variables to point the tailwindcss-ruby gem at the node executable:
TAILWINDCSS_INSTALL_DIR=/rails/node/node_modules/.bin \
NODE_PATH=/rails/node/node_modules \
Ensure npm is installed via apt-get and add the following step to the docker image build:
RUN mkdir /rails/node; npm install --prefix /rails/node tailwindcss @tailwindcss/cli
...
RUN bundle exec bootsnap precompile --gemfile
...
# Cleaning up the tailwindcss workaround
RUN rm -rf /rails/node
After that, the build worked fine.