I am not a PHP expert, but I was having a play with the latest Magento 2 code drop on GitHub.  I thought I would share some little experiences in case helpful to anyone else.

I have Windows 7 on my laptop, so I am running XAMPP for my stack. I had an older installation with an older version of PHP, so I replaced PHP with version 5.5.  (There are newer XAMPP versions I notice now.)  I think only PHP 5.4 is currently officially supported by Magento 2, but I did not want to have to upgrade again any time soon so I took the chance.

Magento 2 seemed to all fire up, but when I went to save a Administration page configuration setting (to turn logging on) I got an error saying ImageMagick was required.

So I grabbed a copy of ImageMagick-6.8.7-Q16 (the latest I could find), then grabbed the first php_imagick.ddl I could find and threw it in C:\xampp\php\ext, added extension=php_imagick.dll in my C:\xampp\php\php.ini file, and thought I was good to go!

Bzzt!  I hit the new DLL hell of 32 versus 64 bit binaries and DLLs.  After being more careful to get 32 bit versions, I used the XAMPP control panel to restart Apache – and promptly got errors about a missing CORE_RL_wand_.dll.

Google is your friend – a quick search and I came across an old post for the same error with Ruby.  This is where I went off the rails – this post is only to help others avoid my mistake here.  It said “use an older version of ImageMagick”.  The problem was I could not find the older version mentioned!

To cut a long story short, it turned out to be a much easier to fix.  I had not restarted the XAMPP control panel – it must have been picking up an old DLL. Restarting the XAMPP control panel and then restarting Apache worked perfectly.  Magento 2 is up and I can start playing.

So the latest ImageMagick build does work with the php_imagick.ddl I got (from http://www.peewit.fr/imagick/ in my case).  The stack overflow article was out of date.