How to enable GD Library with XAMPP PHP 8 on Windows

How to enable the GD image library for PHP 8 with XAMPP on Windows. All that’s needed is a simple php.ini file edit.

Enable GD PHP 8 XAMPP

To enable GD image library on XAMPP PHP 8 open your php.ini file, find your extensions section and add into it:

extension=gd

Now restart Apache for the GD library to be loaded and enabled.

Why?!

For previous versions of PHP (less than PHP 8.0.0) the extension was labelled as gd2 with the dll being php_gd2.dl this was changed in PHP version 8:

extension=gd2 ;Does NOT work with PHP 8

Thankfully XAMPP PHP 8 versions have the GD library pre-packed, it just needs enabling in the config file as seen above.