Rmagick on Ubuntu Gotcha

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

I’ve been caught out by this a couple of times so I thought I would sort post it here as a reminder and helper:

Installing my rails stack on a Ubuntu VPS at Slicehost for my new rails site which uses Imagemagick for photo handling, rails uses rmagick gem to interface with it. I did this:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

and then go to install the rmagick gem with:

sudo gem install rmagick

but get this error:

configure: error: Can't install RMagick. Can't find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program.

Weird, but it turns out you need a little something extra to be able to install RMagick which is “libmagick9-dev” so just install this:

sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev

and then you can install the rmagick gem just fine, hope this helps someone out.

3 Comments so far »

  1. It did indeed help someone out.. thank you.

    Rustin on July 11, 2007 4:41 pm

  2. Glad I could help :)

    Andrew on July 11, 2007 4:46 pm

  3. Helped someone else out too, thank you!

    Jon on July 13, 2007 2:04 pm


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