PHP + GD + Freetype + MacOSX

Rija Ménagé

Jul 20, 2007 • 1 min read

I wanted to test a captcha plugin for Wordpress.

My host provider has a php compiled with GD, but I wanted to test it locally on my computer.

Although php 4.4.4 is installed by default on Mac OS X 10.4.10, for some obscure reasons it's not compiled with GD.

Looking on the web didn't presage well for the installation.

And it turned at as complicated as advertised. I did installed Freetype And Freetype2 using Fink but then got loads of compilation errors when compiling GD with them. Compiling GD with just Freetype is not enough to make the application I'm testing working.

I just wanted to replicate my hosting environment on my Mac and I really didn't want to spend much more time tinkering so I used Marc Liyanage's packaged binaries for Mac OSX and that did the job.