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Rails, RMagick, and Linux

dennis 0 comments Ruby on Rails

Jul 29

Since I’ve been playing around with RMagick on OS X I decided to go through the motions of installing it on my Linux server.  This is necessary since my Rails apps are deployed to this server.  I found a good set of installation instructions on this page that I followed step by step.

Everything compiled and installed successfully until I got to Step 3.  No matter what I tried I received the following error message:

/home/dennis/programs/RMagick-1.13.0/./ext/RMagick/RMagick.so: libMagick.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory – /home/dennis/programs/RMagick-1.13.0/./ext/RMagick/RMagick.so (LoadError)
from /home/dennis/programs/RMagick-1.13.0/./lib/RMagick.rb:11

I was certain that libMagick.so.10 existed /usr/local/lib, but wasn’t sure how to get RMagick to recognize it.  Luckily after an hour or so I decided to see what the README file had to say.  It turns out there’s a variable that can be exported to solve the path problem. Just run this command:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

This solved my problem and I was able to successfully compile and install RMagick.  It’s amazing the amount of time and frustration saved when you actually read the directions.

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