There seems to be a few issues with Imagick in PECL related to setting your own properties on a class that extends Imagick. A project I’m working on at the moment is making heavy use of image processing and I wanted to stick with Imagick over the GD library. A little bit of investigation told me that this bug was fixed in the latest release candidate of Imagick in PECL, so I began investigating how to install a beta release of the extension but Google gave me no hits.

Turns out that it was pretty straight forward, and it seems to have resolved my issues. These are the steps I took to update my installation of PECL Imagick, but they should work if you have the Imagick core library on your system and are just in need of the PHP extension for it.

cd ~/
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/imagick-3.1.0RC1.tgz
cd imagick-3.1.0RC1
./configure --prefix=/usr/lib --with-bzlib=yes --with-fontconfig=yes --with-freetype=yes --with-gslib=yes --with-gvc=yes --with-jpeg=yes --with-jp2=yes --with-png=yes --with-tiff=yes
sudo make
sudo make install
vim /etc/php5/conf.d/imagick.ini (add the line "extension=imagick.so")
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

To verify your installation, you should have the “imagick.so” extension file in /usr/lib/php5/20090626.