Problem installing RMagick rubygem on Centos 5

Question

I'm having problems installing the RMagick rubygem on Centos 5. I've followed the steps detailed in http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install2-linux.html but when I try:

sudo gem install rmagick

the result is:

Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing rmagick:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/local/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for Ruby version >= 1.8.5... yes
checking for gcc... yes
checking for Magick-config... no
Can't install RMagick 2.11.0. Can't find Magick-config in /usr/bin:/bin

*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
    --with-opt-dir
    --without-opt-dir
    --with-opt-include
    --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
    --with-opt-lib
    --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
    --with-make-prog
    --without-make-prog
    --srcdir=.
    --curdir
    --ruby=/usr/local/bin/ruby


Gem files will remain installed in /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.11.0 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.11.0/ext/RMagick/gem_make.out

The directory /usr/local/bin contains Magick-config but I haven't been able to get rubygems to look there. I tried the following but the result was the same:

sudo gem install rmagick -- --with-opt-dir=/usr/local/bin

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

rmagick is notoriously difficult to install due to dependencies on other packages etc. I've just been through this game on Ubuntu and the trick was simply to install the right packages, including dev packages etc. I'm not familiar with CentOS but somebody will probably chime in with the right packages for that.

If all else fails, building and installing ImageMagick from source can usually be made work.

Edit: Looking at a related question, I see the following:

On some platforms (CentOS 5.2), I have had to install specific versions of RMagick because the default repositories for my package manager (yum) only had old versions of the RMagick devel libraries. I installed this version via:

gem install rmagick -v 1.15.13

Answer 2

So I've finally managed to install version 1.15.17 of the rmagick rubygem! Here's what I did:

1. Uninstalled ImageMagick 6.5.4-9 and the delegate libraries that I had installed from source
2. sudo yum install ImageMagick
3. sudo yum install ImageMagick-devel
4. curl -O http://www.zacharywhitley.com/linux/rpms/fedora/core/6/i386/msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
5. sudo rpm -ivh msttcorefonts-2.0-1.noarch.rpm
6. ln -s /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts/ /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType
7. sudo gem install rmagick -v 1.15.17 --no-rdoc --no-ri

Blog entries from David Bock and Will were invaluable.

Answer 3

I've wrote a mini Howto to upgrade ImageMagick and install RMagick 2 on CentOS using RPM packages here:

http://www.cherpec.com/2009/10/howto-install-rmagick-2-on-centosrhel-5/

Answer 4

I got around this in RHEL 5.4 by temporarily symlinking /usr/local/bin/Magick-config to /usr/bin/Magick-conf, so the gem install could find this Magick-config executable.

In my case, I installed ImageMagick from source with '--prefix=/usr/local'. For some reason, the gem install didn't want to look there for the config, even with 'gem install --local ../rmagick-2.12.2.gem -- -with-opt-dir=/usr/local/bin'. Running 'yum install ImageMagick-devel' would get the binary there, but then the gem install would say that ImageMagick was the wrong version.

Answer 5

kept getting this error after following the instructions in the most voted answer:

RMagick: unable to read font `(null)'.

so I have something to add to step 7, taken from an update to David Bock's blog:

http://blog.codesherpas.com/on_the_path/2009/09/installing-centos-5-imagemagick-and-rmagick-september-2009-edition.html

gem install rmagick -v 1.15.17 --no-rdoc --no-ri -- --disable-htmldoc

disabling html-documentation is crucial for avoiding further errors if your font files make rmagick unhappy. Just the outcome of about 2 hours of struggling with this issue.