As a systems administrator I generally use package managers to install software. But in some situations I can not use package manager because provided software version is old or do not compatible. In this situations how can I install new software from source code by compiling.
Software source code can be get in different forms like compressed files like tar.bz2 , tar.gz or from repositories like git , svn etc. We will follow compressed way in this tutorial. To get more information about git read following tutorial.
Download Source Code with wget
As stated previously we will get source code with the tool named wget .We will provide the url of the compressed source code. To get more information about wget look following tutorial.
Wget Command Tutorial With Examples For Linux
$ wget http://poftut.com/HelloWorld.tar.gz
Extract Source Code with tar
Downloaded source code is compressed with tar.gz we will extract it with tar command like below.
$ tar xvf HelloWorld.tar.gz
Install Compiler and Required Libraries
Before compiling the source code we need to install related compilers and required libraries. More information about the required libraries can be found in the README file of the source code. In this step we will install gcc .
$ sudo apt install gcc libgcc-5-dev
Configure
Professional projects generally have configure script. configure script is used to te setup related files and folders before compiling. configure gets information about the current system and compiler with libraries and created Makefile .
$ ./configure
Compile with Make
Now the most important part we will compile the source code. Make is very useful tool to compile the source code according to provided configuration. there is very complex compile configurations where they are easily handled by make command. We will just issue make like below. make should be run in source code root directory.
$ make
Make Compile Faster
Modern computers have more than single CPU core. If we do not provide any option the make command will compile the source code only using single core. We can use other cores during compile with -j option. This will use given number of cores. In this example we want to use 4 cores.
$ make -j 4
Install with Make Install
Last step is installing the compiled binaries. We will use make install command. If the binaries will be copied to the directories those we do not have write right we should use with sudo command.
$ sudo make install