Install Imagick extension for PHP 8 in macOS Big Sur

I am really grateful I’ve had a chance to have the Mac mini M1 on a new year 2021. It’s really fast, even I only use 8 gigs ram version! Also, the software that in my old mac no longer can use its latest update – like php with homebrew – is back! In this post, I will show you how to install imagick for PHP 8 in macOS Big Sur for it.

First, I assume that you already have Homebrew installed. Next is install PHP 8, we can use shivammathur/php for it, the installation steps are in its readme.

When PHP 8 installed, we can ensure that imagemagick already installed, if not, if we can install via Homebrew as well:

$ brew install imagemagick

Now, time to install imagick. There is no imagick release yet for php 8, but we can install the dev-master already following this issue :

$ git clone https://github.com/Imagick/imagick
$ cd imagick
$ phpize && ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

When you run make, if you got the following error:

/opt/homebrew/Cellar/php/8.0.0_1/include/php/ext/pcre/php_pcre.h:23:10: fatal error: 'pcre2.h' file not found

You can copy installed pcre2.h from Homebrew:

cp /opt/homebrew/Cellar/pcre2/10.36/include/pcre2.h .

Next, you can re-run :

$ make
$ sudo make install

After it installed, you can register imagick.so to /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.0/php.ini:

extension="imagick.so"

Now, let’s check if it is installed:

➜  ~ php -a
Interactive shell

php > echo phpversion('imagick');
@PACKAGE_VERSION@

Yes, above @PACKAGE_VERSION@ should be just fine. That’s it!