I changed a server for Magento sites. When I migrated the sites, they looked fine. However after I flushed Magento image cache, all sites stopped working. Web pages were not completed. The code stopped rendering after the first product image’s “src”. But there was no error message afterwards.
At first I thought it was file permission problem. But it was not.
Then I thought it was some rubbish left over after flushing cache. So I took the advice by removing the folder media/catalog/product/cache and clearing everything under var. But the problem was still there.
Then I realised it was php not generating images for Magento. Magento requires php-gd to generate images. My new server did not have php-gd installed. If I was installing a Magento instance, I would not get through. But I migrated the sites. So they “looked” fine.
After installed php-gd, product images came back.
By the way, Magento requires some other PHP extensions to run. I took the chance to install them all.
pdo_mysql
simplexml
mcrypt
hash
gd
dom
iconv
curl
soap