Installing RMagick Ruby Gem on Mac OS X 10.4.9
When you want to manipulate images with Ruby (or your Rails application) you’ll probably want RMagick installed. This is no easy feat on Mac OS X.
The official guide suggests installing X11 and using darwinports to install everything. This guide shows you how to easily install RMagick on you Mac OS X system. In this case I use Mac OS X 10.4.9.
Before you jump in, make sure you have Xcode installed. You can get it for free from Apple.
I’ll also assume you have Ruby and rubygems installed and working already.
You will need to download, compile and install several graphics libraries that RMagick needs. Let’s do this now.
curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz tar xzvf freetype-2.1.10.tar.gz cd freetype-2.1.10 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install cd .. curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2 bzip2 -dc libpng-1.2.10.tar.bz2 | tar xv cd libpng-1.2.10 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install cd .. curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz cd jpeg-6b ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4 ./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install cd .. curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz cd tiff-3.8.2 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install cd ..
Next we install ImageMagick:
curl -O http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz tar xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.0-0.tar.gz cd ImageMagick-6.3.0 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local make sudo make install cd ..
And now, ladies and gentlemen, what you’ve all been waiting for: RMagick:
sudo gem install --no-rdoc --no-ri RMagick
In my case the generation of the documentation fails, so I tell rubygems not to compile the docs.
You now have RMagick installed on you Mac OS X 10.4.9 machine! Congratulations!








thank you! :) I was having trouble with ri and rdoc generation, but –no-ri and –no-rdoc worked fine.
Worked great — thanks!
Excellent instructions, worked perfectly. Thank you!
Used GraphicsMagick (minus PERLMagick) instead of ImageMagick.
curl -O ftp://ftp.graphicsmagick.org/pub/GraphicsMagick/GraphicsMagick-1.1.8.tar.bz2
bzip2 -dc GraphicsMagick-1.1.8.tar.bz2 | tar xv
cd GraphicsMagick-1.1.8
./configure –prefix=/usr/local –without-perl
make
sudo make install
cd ..
Installation of the RMagick gem was flawless.
Just worked fine for Leopard, with changes to latest download locations and “export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5″ of course.
For the love of god thank you! This has been a major headache for me and you’ve solved it in a few easy steps! thank you thank you thank you!