Building on Debian or Ubuntu

Building Debian packages (including Ubuntu) of FreeRADIUS from source is kept as simple as possible.

Building the stable release (v3.0)

Building packages should be very simple. First obtain a copy of the source and unpack it. Second, build the packages.

Getting the source

Do one of the following:

Get the latest stable release

https://freeradius.org/ftp/pub/freeradius/

Look for freeradius-server-3.0.*.tar.gz

OR the latest development version from the git repository (version 3.0.x)

git clone https://github.com/FreeRADIUS/freeradius-server.git
cd freeradius-server
git checkout v3.0.x

OR the latest development version from a zip file (version 3.0.x)

wget https://github.com/FreeRADIUS/freeradius-server/archive/v3.0.x.zip
unzip v3.0.x.zip
cd freeradius-server-3.0.x/

Installing build dependencies

Use the following to make sure that all build dependencies are all installed:

sudo apt-get install devscripts quilt debhelper fakeroot equivs
fakeroot debian/rules debian/control
fakeroot debian/rules clean
sudo mk-build-deps -ir debian/control

Building Packages

Having retrieved whichever version of the source you require and installed dependencies, build the FreeRADIUS packages:

make deb

This will build packages in the parent directory, which can be installed with dpkg -i or apt install.

On recent releases you should ensure the source tree is completely clean before running make deb, e.g. do not run ./configure first. (However, on releases before 3.0.16 you must run ./configure first.)

Building from source

Alternatively, rather than building packages, you can build the source directly. Note that you will need to ensure all required dependencies are installed first (such as libkqueue-dev, libtalloc-dev, and libssl-dev).

# Use ./configure --enable-developer if you're debugging issues, or using unstable code.
./configure
make
sudo make install

Building development versions (v4.0)

Note that version 4 is for developers only. Do not use these versions unless you know what you are doing.

Upgrading GCC

Older versions of Debian and Ubuntu use GCC < 4.8, which lacks support for the C11 features needed to build FreeRADIUS >= v4.0.x.

In order to switch to GCC 4.9

sudo apt-get install software-properties-common python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install g++-4.9

# Then select GCC 4.9
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.8 100 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.8
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.9 50 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.9 
sudo update-alternatives --config gcc

# Choose option 3 from the dialogue

Installing hard dependencies

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libtalloc-dev libkqueue-dev

Building

Get the source as described above, then:

./configure --enable-developer
make
sudo make install