Installing ImageMagick without headaches

This is simple: on windows systems you have the option to use the automated installer here, it’s neither complicated or hard to install. On Linux based systems I recommend to install it from source for obvious reasons like you know what’s installed, where, and if there was a problem, you can debug easily because the log is displayed.
So, login using SSH, you will need to login with a username which has compiling and install privileges.
After you logged in, create a directory where you place the gzipped package you will download from Imagemagick.org.
after you created the directory, type in the console:

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.4.2-1.tar.gz

Currently (13th of July, 2008) 6.4.2 is the latest version of ImageMagick, you may want to check what is the latest release when you install your ImageMagick.
So, the above command will download the imagemagick package to your server.
Let’s depack it using tar, tar, not untar as there’s no such command on Linux

tar xvfz ImageMagick-6.4.2-1.tar.gz

Depacked. Change the directory to the newly created ImageMagick directory, then let’s configure and compile it:

./configure
make


If everything was OK, no error, warning or any other weird stuff during compile, you are safe to install it:

make install


And theoretically you are done. To test your installation try Imagemagick’s convert program, if it works, you’re the best! Type the following in the command line:

/usr/local/bin/convert logo: logo.gif


ImageMagick is a dependency for Imagick PECL, so before you can use it in PHP for example, the first step is to install ImageMagick THEN Imagick.

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