ImageMagick is a PHP library for image processing and image generation. It is a requirement for a popular library, stojg/crop that offers various cropping techniques. The library can be installed easily via Composer, but it requires ImageMagick to work.

Installing ImageMagick on Ubuntu / Debian

You are lucky, there is a package for that. It is just a one line command:

sudo apt-get install php5-imagick

It will grab ImageMagick, build the PHP extension and enable it in your php.ini file. You may have to restart your web server or PHP-FPM to reflect the changes.

Using ImageMagick on Travis CI

If you are running a continuous integration test suite, you may be interested to test some methods that are using the ImageMagick library under the hood. In order to do that, the ImageMagick library needs to be installed on the Travis’ VM. At the time, the ImageMagick library is already pulled in for every VM, but the PHP extension is not enabled by default. We will still try to grab the library before enabling it, just to be cautious. You’ll have to edit your travis.yml file and add the following lines to your before_script:

before_script:
  - sudo apt-get update -q
  - sudo apt-get install -y imagemagick
  - printf "\n" | pecl install imagick

The last line is a very dirty hack: when running the command pecl install imagick, you have to hit “Enter” to autodetect some settings. That’s why you need to pipe a new line to this command. Dirty, but it works, you’ll be able to test methods using ImageMagick afterwards.