TheNitai

I had to spent way too much time the last time to set up ImageMagick and Ghostscript together that I simply jump right in so you don’t have to waste time on this, like I did.

Creating thumbnails and images from a PDF is one of the most used features within Razuna. But the other day, when we run the normal convert command we were faced with an error message within our web application of:

Error: Uncaught exception ‘ImagickException’ with message ‘Postscript delegate failed....: No such file or directory

Of course, the first thing I did was to see if we have a error in the shell. Strangely, there was NO error when running the same command in the shell! Needless to say, I spent many hours looking for a solution, trying out different things from reinstalling ImageMagick and Ghostscript to looking all over the web for an answer.

In the end, it boiled down to that web applications (be it CFML, PHP, etc.), are looking for a different executable path then when you run command from the shell. Since Ghostscript installed the executable in the “/usr/local/bin/gs” path the web application could not find it. So the solution to “hours of pain” was to simply create a symbolic link to the “gs” library in the “/usr/bin” directory with:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/gs /usr/bin/gs

Hope this helps the next seeker!

My favorite choice for running a Linux Server is CentOS, since it is based on the RedHat distribution you can rest assured you will get a top notch enterprise offering and stability. As with all things “enterprise” the priority is on stability and security and not on the latest code releases. This works 99% of the time, but sometimes you still need some update.

In the case of ImageMagick, CentOS comes with version 6.2.8, it was a bug that was fixed with PSD conversion and thus I needed to get the latest version installed. So, here are the steps to install ImageMagick 6.5.7 on CentOS 5.x. Mind you, that you will loose the internal patch upgrading from yum, but all you need to install to the next version is just to follow these steps again.

Uninstall current version
Uninstall the current version with:

yum erase ImageMagick*

This will uninstall ImageMagick 6.2.8 and if you have any other versions installed, like the devel one.

Install the needed dependencies
ImageMagick depends on a couple of additional libraries to convert to different formats. Let us just make sure, that they are all installed with:

yum install tcl-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel ghostscript-devel bzip2-devel freetype-devel libtiff-devel

Download and extract latest ImageMagick version
You can always get the latest ImageMagick version directly from their website. Code below will download and extract the file.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xcvf ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.5.7-5

Configure and make ImageMagick
With the below configure command we are configuring ImageMagick with the most needed options. Feel free to adjust it to your needs. As always issue a “–help” to see all the available options.

configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-bzlib=yes --with-fontconfig=yes --with-freetype=yes --with-gslib=yes --with-gvc=yes --with-jpeg=yes --with-jp2=yes --with-png=yes --with-tiff=yes

Wait until configure has finished. At the end you will see all the enable options. When you think all went well issue:

make

Now is a good time to make yourself some coffee or continue coding your next big killer application because make will take some time to finish. When it’s done, issue:

make install

That’s it! You are done. Wasn’t so bad, was it? Check with:

convert --version

That ImageMagick is properly installed and that you got the current version up and running. If all went well you should see something similar to this:

Version: ImageMagick 6.5.7-5 2009-11-08 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2009 ImageMagick Studio LLC