Installing The RMagick Rubygem On Media Temple’s DV

February 01, 2007 | 1 Minute Read

Damn you, RMagick Clown! You haunt my nightmares!!!

Oh boy, so once I got rails actually running on my dv, I figured out that my applications needed the RMagick ruby gem. RMagick does graphics stuff, like resizing and creating captcha images and whatnot, so I really need it. I ran into a few gotchas while trying to install RMagic (well, installing ImageMagick) so here’s what I did:

First, you must install ImageMagick. This involves installing a bunch of dependencies first. I did all of the ones listed on the Rmagick ImageMagick installation guide, but the ./configure command still wouldn’t see the jpeg delegate library.

The error message I got when trying to install RMagick was like this: “No decode delegate for this image format.” I found out from this page that I needed to run: “./configure –enable-shared” for it to register properly. When I tried running make and make install, I got some error like this:

Magick::ImageMagickError: unable to read font `…/ghostscript/fonts/n019003l.pfb’

It turns out the font directory set up for ImageMagick didn’t have any fonts… So I downloaded the GhostScript fonts (I had already installed GhostScript) into that directory. And it worked. The end.