A few years ago i wrote a post moaning about how difficult it is to install imagick on Centos. Well i have to say that was a breeze compared to installing it on Windows..
As we know it is a PECL extension. On the page we see this “This extension requires ImageMagick version 6.5.3-10+ and PHP 5.4.0+.”.
But what they are not saying there is that you should not use the official windows binaries that you get from imagemagick.org. In fact they are saying the opposite.
When I installed the official binaries together with the PECL extension I got low level crashes of php-cgi.exe. There wasn’t much information on to why.
After that I noticed that on the bottom of the download page of imagemagick that they require Visual C++ 2013 while the php PECL extension and PHP itself require Visual C++ 2015 (VC14). So that explained the crashes.
Just as I was thinking about compiling it myself – I found this great article. The guy has went through the same pain as me.
In that article there is a link to PECL dependencies folder. The link is http://windows.php.net/downloads/PECL/deps# in there there is a different build of the imagick runtime. So I downloaded that and uninstalled the official imagick binaries.
I then added the environmental variables as explained in that article and boom – it started working.