Rmagick gem and Imagemagick with Homebrew

Dependency management is hard. Some of us are still stucked with rmagick, and sadly this library hasn’t been updated in years. I think that minimagick is a good replacement, but sometimes we just can’t control all our dependencies.

After upgrading imagemagick via homebrew, you try to run your rails project, and you get all kind of messages telling you that your rmagick gem does not work anymore…we’ve all been there.

After poking around in the homebrew documentation, I finally found a combination of commands that worked for me. Try running the following in your terminal:

  cd /usr/local/Cellar/imagemagick/6.8.0-10/lib
  ln -s libMagick++-Q16.7.dylib   libMagick++.dylib
  ln -s libMagickCore-Q16.7.dylib libMagickCore.dylib
  ln -s libMagickWand-Q16.7.dylib libMagickWand.dylib

After relinking the libraries, you can try to install the gem again and you should have no problems.

I hope it helps.