Recently I needed Rmagick installed on my Mac OS X 10.4 system. This turned out to be nearly impossible, until I got down and dirty and just went for a fresh compile from source. Actually it became more impossible until I found enlightenment on the long and arduous journey. The following is a pretty bare-bones install. It leaves out excess functionality like exporting to TIFF, working with PostScript or PDF files, color management, EXIF headers, SVG images, or MSWord documents. All of this functionality can be added by downloading the source from the links above, and compiling them before you run ./configure for ImageMagick. You can also install GraphicsMagick if you like, it shouldn’t make a difference which one you use.

The following instructions will have you up and running in no time (actually about 30 minutes depending on the speed of your system ImageMagick takes forever). These instructions assume you have installed Ruby according to the instructions at HiveLogic. If you have not, make sure you atleast follow the steps up to the point of installing ruby. This makes sure your path is correct and your build environment is in place.

X11:

10.4 Tiger install DVD or http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/x11formacosx.html

Freetype2:

curl -O http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/freetype/freetype-2.2.1.tar.gz
tar zxvf freetype-2.2.1.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.2.1
./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ..

Jpeg:

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar zxvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.4
./configure --enable-shared && make && sudo make install
cd ..

PNG:

curl -O http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.10-no-config.tar.gz
tar zxvf libpng-1.2.10-no-config.tar.gz
cd libpng-1.2.10
cp scripts/makefile.darwin Makefile
make && sudo make install
cd ..

ImageMagick:

curl -O http://umn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/imagemagick/ImageMagick-6.2.8-0.tar.gz
tar zxvf ImageMagick-6.2.8-0.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.2.8
./configure && make && sudo make install
cd ..

RMagick (finally and thankfully):

sudo gem install rmagick

That’s it, goto RMagick’s web site for information on using RMagick in your apps. Be on the look out for an incredible little Camping app that uses the power of RMagick to appear on VD soon!