10. Building BIND 9

To build on a Unix or Linux system, use:

$ autoreconf -fi ### (only if building from the git repository)
$ ./configure
$ make

Several environment variables affect compilation, and they can be set before running configure. The most significant ones are:

Variable	Description
`CC`	The C compiler to use. `configure` tries to figure out the right one for supported systems.
`CFLAGS`	The C compiler flags. Defaults to include -g and/or -O2 as supported by the compiler. Please include `-g` if `CFLAGS` needs to be set.
`LDFLAGS`	The linker flags. Defaults to an empty string.

Additional environment variables affecting the build are listed at the end of the configure help text, which can be obtained by running the command:

$ ./configure --help

If using Emacs, the make tags command may be helpful.

10.1. Required Libraries

To build BIND 9, the following packages must be installed:

libcrypto, libssl
liburcu
libuv
perl
pkg-config / pkgconfig / pkgconf

BIND 9.19 requires libuv 1.34.0 or higher, using libuv >= 1.40.0 is recommended. Compiling or running with libuv 1.35.0 or 1.36.0 is not supported, as this could lead to an assertion failure in the UDP receive code. On older systems, an updated libuv package needs to be installed from sources such as EPEL, PPA, or other native sources. The other option is to build and install libuv from source.

OpenSSL 1.0.2e or newer is required. If the OpenSSL library is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-openssl=<PREFIX> on the configure command line. To use a PKCS#11 hardware service module for cryptographic operations, engine_pkcs11 from the OpenSC project must be compiled and used.

The Userspace RCU library liburcu (https://liburcu.org/) is used for lock-free data structures and concurrent safe memory reclamation.

On Linux, process capabilities are managed in user space using the libcap library (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/libs/libcap/libcap.git/), which can be installed on most Linux systems via the libcap-dev or libcap-devel package.

To build BIND from the git repository, the following tools must also be installed:

autoconf (includes autoreconf)
automake
libtool

10.2. Optional Features

To see a full list of configuration options, run configure --help.

To improve performance, use of the jemalloc library (http://jemalloc.net/) is strongly recommended.

To support DNS over HTTPS (DoH), the server must be linked with libnghttp2 (https://nghttp2.org/). If the library is unavailable, --disable-doh can be used to disable DoH support.

To support the HTTP statistics channel, the server must be linked with at least one of the following libraries: libxml2 (http://xmlsoft.org) or json-c (https://github.com/json-c/json-c). If these are installed at a nonstandard location, then:

for libxml2, specify the prefix using --with-libxml2=/prefix,
for json-c, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

To support compression on the HTTP statistics channel, the server must be linked against zlib (https://zlib.net/). If this is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-zlib=/prefix.

To support storing configuration data for runtime-added zones in an LMDB database, the server must be linked with liblmdb (https://github.com/LMDB/lmdb). If this is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-lmdb=/prefix.

To support MaxMind GeoIP2 location-based ACLs, the server must be linked with libmaxminddb (https://maxmind.github.io/libmaxminddb/). This is turned on by default if the library is found; if the library is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-maxminddb=/prefix. GeoIP2 support can be switched off with --disable-geoip.

For DNSTAP packet logging, libfstrm (https://github.com/farsightsec/fstrm) and libprotobuf-c (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) must be installed, and BIND must be configured with --enable-dnstap.

To support internationalized domain names in dig, libidn2 (https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/#libidn2) must be installed. If the library is installed in a nonstandard location, specify the prefix using --with-libidn2=/prefix or adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

For line editing in nsupdate and nslookup, either the readline (https://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html) or the libedit library (https://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/) must be installed. If these are installed at a nonstandard location, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH. readline is used by default, and libedit can be explicitly requested using --with-readline=libedit.

On some platforms it is necessary to explicitly request large file support to handle files bigger than 2GB. This can be done by using --enable-largefile on the configure command line.

Support for the “fixed” RRset-order option can be enabled or disabled by specifying --enable-fixed-rrset or --disable-fixed-rrset on the configure command line. By default, fixed RRset-order is disabled to reduce memory footprint.

The --enable-querytrace option causes named to log every step while processing every query. The --enable-singletrace option turns on the same verbose tracing, but allows an individual query to be separately traced by setting its query ID to 0. These options should only be enabled when debugging, because they have a significant negative impact on query performance.

make install installs named and the various BIND 9 libraries. By default, installation is into /usr/local, but this can be changed with the --prefix option when running configure.

The option --sysconfdir can be specified to set the directory where configuration files such as named.conf go by default; --localstatedir can be used to set the default parent directory of run/named.pid. --sysconfdir defaults to $prefix/etc and --localstatedir defaults to $prefix/var.

10.3. macOS

Building on macOS assumes that the “Command Tools for Xcode” are installed. These can be downloaded from https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ or, if Xcode is already installed, simply run xcode-select --install. (Note that an Apple ID may be required to access the download page.)