PHP imagick “module not installed, or disabled” message

Do you have access to the command line on your hosting server? If so, you could try installing imagick with this:

sudo apt install php-imagick

As @aoking mentioned, this is a module that needs to be installed on the server, if you had it with PHP 7.2, it is likely there for 7.3 as well, but hasn’t been enabled yet.

If your host provides a control panel of some sorts, you can often enable/disable modules your self there, if not I noticed you’d already reached out to them, you could use that ticket to let them know the module hasn’t been enabled yet for PHP 7.3 and it should be a quick fix for them to get it enabled.

Thanks for the replies @aoking and @clorith My host now tells me that they don’t support imagick above PHP5.6. Instead they use the GD module, which does the same job.

Sound reasonable?

I’m seeing this message from Site Health as well. My PHP version is 7.1 – the latest my hosting company offers right now. Looking at the results from phpinfo() did not indicate imagick.

I got hold of my hosting company and they advised me to add this line to my php.ini file:

extension=imagick.so

After doing that, phpinfo() indicates imagick as available. Yet, WP Site Health continues to deliver the recommended improvement message. I’m continuing to look for a solution but since no one’s mentioned this I figured to throw in my two cents.

Hmm. I’m not comfortable adding that to the php.ini file since my host tells me they don’t support imagick.

I’m minded to leave things as they are, and assume for the time being that GD does the same job as imagick.

Thanks for the two-cents-worth.

In your shoes, @kevanp, I wouldn’t be comfortable either, although I doubt it could bring trouble from which an easy recovery isn’t possible.

I just might be in a similar situation, even though I was clear to my hosting company that I was using PHP 7.1. I’ve done a bit more fooling around with this and here’s what I’m seeing, with my php.ini file as described earlier.

• imagick module version is 3.4.3, according to phpinfo()
• with PHP 7.1.14 the WP Site Health warning appears
• with PHP 7.0.25 the WP Site Health warning appears
• with PHP 5.6.30 the WP Site Health does not appear

This leads me to believe that either 1) my host is like yours the tech didn’t know that or didn’t tell me that or didn’t pay attention when I said PHP 7.1, or 2) what I put in my php.ini file at the suggestion of my host didn’t point to the correct imagick version.

For now I’m going to ignore the WP recommendation and get on with life. I’m not falling back to PHP 5.6 just to get over it. I’ll put off until later going back to this host with my findings so far. I’ve got other WP installations to upgrade, some on different hosts as well as different hosting packages on this host. I’ll keep an eye on what works and what doesn’t and, with luck, figure out a solution along the way.

Y’know, WP 5.2 is new so there could always be a bug in Site Health that doesn’t handle certain cases like these. Never know. There’s an awful lot of variety across hosting companies and their packages.

Thing is @plav my hosting provider says they don’t support imagick above PHP5.6. So I think we can exonerate WP5.2. It’s quite correct in reporting that imagick is not installed.

I have no idea what exactly imagick does, and how it compares with GD. My site certainly doesn’t seem to have any issues with images.

It’s a bit frustrating. People at my host don’t know enough—the one’s I am talking to via support/chat. So it’s a big task to make them add the Imagick module. It’s there on 7.2 but strangely not in 7.3

I had the same issue on both hosts I’m using.

– With PHP 7.2, site health is 93%, recommending me to update to PHP 7.3.
– Updating to PHP 7.3, site health is 93%, telling me that imagick is missing.

One host added imagick for PHP 7.3 when I requested it, and Site Health went up to 100%

Efforts to activate imagick under PHP 7.3 in cPanel did not satisfy WordPress. Waiting for second host to reply.

Is imagick a hazard? I don’t like asking hosts to install extensions that aren’t supported anymore…

Oh – and a warning. On my hosts, ea-php 7.3 and alt-php 7.3 are available. Switching to alt-php 7.3 causes white screen of death on my sites. Switching back to ea-php 7.3 resolves that issue. A specific recommendation in Site Health on which php “branch” that is recommended would be nice.

Bjarne

Hiya,

Imagick is recommended as it provides extra functionality, but it’s not required.

As for the branch stuff, we only base our selves off the final releases, so no branches to think of. ea is “Early Access” and “alt” I (presume) is a custom alternative version made by your host.

Both my hosts added imagick to their ea-php 7.3 servers, and site health went up to 100.

Both hosts are knowledgable, and did not raise any alarms regarding imagick. They would have, had it been a hazard (I guess).

I like the new site health feature. It helps us admins eliminiate known causes of problems. Still, pushing the absolutely latest version of PHP can, as anyone following this thread know, also cause some issues with some plugins or themes..

For PHP 7.3 and Cpanel, do this:

On the terminal:
yum -y install ImageMagick-devel ImageMagick-c++-devel

Then on WHM:
1) On WHM go to Home ?Software ?Module Installers
2) Click manage next to PHP Pecl
3) Select PHP version (in this case 7.3) click apply
4) On the “install a PHP Pecl” box type “imagick” without the quotes and click install now.
5) Wait
6) Enjoy your wordpress site at a 100% health ??

My hosting uses CPanel. When I changed my version of PHP it came up with a list of php functions with check boxes. Imagick was ones I ticked it and CPAnel reported success at turning it on.

I just installed Imagick on my VPS and I’m still getting this error message

UPDATE: Problem fixed by Restarting PHP-FPM service for Apache

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Udegbunam Chukwudi.

@dxiri good fix, just what we needed.. thanks