1.13 Building and Installing BIND

1.13.1 Problem

You need to build and install BIND.

1.13.2 Solution

Once you've downloaded BIND's source code, building and installing it is usually easy. First, unpack the distribution. The BIND 9 distribution unpacks into its own subdirectory, named for the release, so you can unpack it with:

# cd /usr/local/src       or your source directory
# tar -zxvf /tmp/bind-9.2.1.tar.gz
[Lots of output]
# cd bind-9.2.1

BIND 8 distributions unpack into the current working directory, so you may want to create a subdirectory for the distribution before unpacking:

# cd /usr/local/src
# mkdir bind-8.3.3
# cd bind-8.3.3
# tar -zxvf /tmp/bind-src.tar.gz
[Lots of output]

Next, make sure that the build will use the appropriate settings for your operating system. BIND 9 uses the automagical configure program to determine what it needs to know about your operating system and the installation environment. You may still want to specify compilation options, alternate installation directories and the like; to find out what aspects of the build and the installation you can configure, read the README file in the top-level directory of the distribution, or run configure - -help. Once you've decided, run configure with those options, and once it's finished, run make:

# ./configure
# make

BIND 8 still uses a Makefile. To change compilation options, find the subdirectory of src/port relevant to your operating system -- for example, src/port/freebsd for FreeBSD. Edit the Makefile.set file in that directory as you see fit, then build BIND with:

# make clean
# make depend
# make all

Finally, to install either BIND 8 or BIND 9, run:

# make install

You'll probably need to su to root to install the various binaries and libraries.

1.13.3 Discussion

If you have problems building BIND, check the archives of the mailing lists and newsgroups in Section 1.2, and any newsgroups specific to your operating system for hints. You might also want to look for BIND in archives of precompiled binaries for your operating system, as described in Section 1.14.

1.13.4 See Also

Section 1.12 for getting the BIND source code and Section 1.14 for getting precompiled copies of BIND, and Appendix C of DNS and BIND.