10. Building BIND 9

To build on a Unix or Linux system, use:

$ meson setup build-dir
$ meson compile -C build-dir

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

Variable	Description
`CC`	The C compiler to use. `configure` tries to figure out the right one for supported systems.
`CC_LD`	The C linker to use.
`CFLAGS`	The C compiler flags. Defaults to an empty string.
`LDFLAGS`	The linker flags. Defaults to an empty string.

10.1. Required Libraries

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

a C11-compliant compiler
meson
libcrypto, libssl
liburcu
libuv
perl
pkg-config / pkgconfig / pkgconf

BIND 9 requires meson 0.61 or higher to configure and ninja/samurai to build from source.

BIND 9.20 requires libuv 1.37.0 or higher; using libuv >= 1.40.0 is recommended. 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 1.1.1 or newer is required. If the OpenSSL library is installed in a nonstandard location adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path.

To use a PKCS#11 hardware service module for cryptographic operations, PKCS#11 Provider (https://github.com/latchset/pkcs11-provider/tree/main) must be compiled, configured and used directly in the OpenSSL 3.x.

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.

10.2. Optional Features

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

To improve performance, use of the jemalloc library (https://jemalloc.net/) is strongly recommended. Version 4.0.0 or newer is required when in use.

To support DNS over HTTPS (DoH), the server must be linked with libnghttp2 (https://nghttp2.org/). If the library is unavailable, -Ddoh=disabled 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 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/wikis/home) or json-c (https://github.com/json-c/json-c). If these are installed at a nonstandard location, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --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, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path. Compression can be switched off with -Dzlib=disabled.

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, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path.

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, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path. GeoIP2 support can be switched off with -Dgeoip=disabled.

For DNSTAP packet logging, libfstrm (https://github.com/farsightsec/fstrm) and libprotobuf-c (https://protobuf.dev) must be installed, and BIND must be configured with -Ddnstap=enabled.

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, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path. IDN support can be switched off with -Didn=disabled.

For line editing in nsupdate and nslookup, the libedit library (https://www.thrysoee.dk/editline/) must be installed. If these are installed at a nonstandard location, adjust PKG_CONFIG_PATH or use the option --pkg-config-path.

The -Dtrace-logging=query option causes named to log every step while processing every query. The -Dtrace-logging=query,single 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.

meson 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 meson setup.

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/xcode/resources/ or, if Xcode is already installed, simply run xcode-select --install. (Note that an Apple ID may be required to access the download page.)

10.4. Packager Builds

Packagers are recommended to use the plain optimization level or the plain build type when setting up the build directory. This will also disable the default hardening flags and any such flag must be set with CFLAGS. The top meson.build file in the source tree can be inspected for recommended flags.