Software Development | Ruby on Rails
Installing RMagick on Windows

I want to create some images on the fly so I've installed RMagick however installing it on Windows isn't as simple as installing the gem. The rmagick gem only works on Linux, BSD, OS X and similar so you'll need to do a bit more work.

What is RMagick

RMagick is an interface between the Ruby programming language and the ImageMagick® and GraphicsMagick image processing libraries. There are two versions of RMagick, RMagick 1 and RMagick 2. You will want RMagick 2. RMagick 2 works with Ruby 1.8.5 and later (including Ruby 1.9) and ImageMagick 6.3.5 and later, and all new enhancements to RMagick will be in RMagick 2. RMagick 2 does not work with GraphicsMagick.

RMagick and ImageMagick Documentation

The old home for rmagick was at RubyForge: RMagick. They have just moved to GitHub: RMagick. Just at the moment there still seems a lot more documentation at RubyForge: RMagick.

Both RMagick and ImageMagick install their entire documentation set on your machine when they are installed.

The Installation Process 

The steps:

1. Download rmagick-2.12.0-windows-binary-gem-for-Ruby-1.8.6.zip (or any more recent version) from GitHub: rmagick download into a temporary folder.

ImageMagick and RMagick

Do not use any other version of ImageMagick. RMagick will not run if you install any other version of ImageMagick.

2. Install ImageMagick using the ImageMagick installer (ImageMagick-6.5.6-8-Q8-windows-dll.exe) found in the temporary directory.

2.1 Choose "Add application directory to your system path" from the installation options (selected by default). The other options are up to you.

3. Install the RMagick gem: 

gem install rmagick --local