Installing PerlMagick in Windows IIS

You would think that when an application installation offers to install a component for you, it would do what it is suggesting. Unfortunately, if the application in question is ImageMagick – and more specifically if we are talking about the PerlMagick component of ImageMagick for Windows, then the answer is absolutely not.

At first I thought perhaps the problem is that the files were in use, as we all know that if Windows has files in use, the won’t be updated. So I rebooted. No luck. Then I uninstalled the prior version and tried again. Nothing. I rebooted, to make sure the prior version was gone. I removed the old files manually. I rebooted. I deleted registry entries. I got rid of every scrap I could find from the old version. I rebooted. Still nothing. The fact is that it just wasn’t installing.

As it turns out, it’s not that hard to make it work. You just have to realize that in some cases, when it says it is doing it, it isn’t. That’s a shame. It could at least tell you that it isn’t doing what it says that it is.

The main reason is that it’s a real pain to figure out what needs to be done.

First you have to figure out where the application (in this case, we’re talking ImageMagick) installs. The best place to look is probably in the Program Files directory. But hopefully if you are doing the installation, you are familiar with your server, because it could potentially be anywhere. And since the version is appended to the directory, you need to be aware of the version you are installing. Otherwise you could install the wrong version, which may cause at least as many problems as you solve. It might even be easier to uninstall every version you have and then install only the new one.

So once you have a new version, open a command prompt in that location, change to the perlmagick directory and run ppm install. It’s really that simple.


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