Rails, RMagick, and OS X

There’s always seems to be some daunting hurdle when dealing with relatively new technologies. I stumbled across the hurdle this evening and it’s one that will either “make you or break you”. For me it was getting RMagick working with Rails on OS X. Luckily I stumbled across this INCREDIBLE article that explains almost everything you need to know.

I use the word almost because after compiling and installing the different sources I still ran into a problem installing RMagick. Since the article mentions configuring everything for /usr/local it turns out that this wasn’t in my path. So after you get through the article (and before you install the RMagick gem) be sure to add /usr/local/bin to your path and you should be able to install the RMagick gem with no trouble. The command looks like:

export PATH=”/usr/local/bin:$PATH”

I would say that for even a seasoned developer or *nix admin you’re looking at about an hour from start to finish. Building ImageMagick takes a good 10-15 minutes alone. Your results may vary, but I think you’ll lose sight of time once you successfully get everything up and running!

2 Responses to “Rails, RMagick, and OS X”

1. [db75] » Blog Archive » Rails, RMagick, and Linux says:

   July 29, 2006 at 10:36 pm

   [...] « Rails, RMagick, and OS X [...]
2. Octavian says:

   November 26, 2006 at 9:05 am

   Thx alot for this article, it helped me get out of trouble. I still dunno how to acces the program fromphp, but i’m getting there