Image toolkit switched to ImageMagick even when it is not installed

I built the Drupal CMS German Installer (dcgi) to install Drupal CMS and its site templates in German. Its goal is to find problems with the Drupal CMS site templates, their default content and their translation into languages other than English. This issue is one I found while working on it.

Problem/Motivation

The recipe sets system.image:toolkit to imagemagick and imagemagick.settings:binaries to imagemagick without checking that the ImageMagick binaries exist. On a host without them (for example a fresh container, which identify returns nothing) every image operation fails. In my test installation of Varbase Starter this was logged 83 times: ImageMagick error 127: sh: 1: exec: identify: not found. The installer finishes without a warning, but no image style is generated, so images in the content do not show. With toolkit: gd they do.

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Drupal CMS with Varbase Starter on a host without ImageMagick.
2. Open a blog post: the image is missing.
3. Open Reports → Recent log messages.

Proposed resolution

Keep ImageMagick as the default, but only switch the toolkit if the binaries are found. Otherwise stay on GD, or name ImageMagick as a requirement in the description.

AI disclosure

I used Claude to help draft and shorten this text. The findings are from my own test installation.