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!