Installation instructions for HAProxy

=====================================

This is a development version, so it is expected to break from time to time,

to add and remove features without prior notification and it should not be used

in production. If you are not used to build from sources or if you are not used

to follow updates then it is recommended that instead you use the packages

provided by your software vendor or Linux distribution. Most of them are taking

this task seriously and are doing a good job at backporting important fixes. If

for any reason you'd prefer to use a different version than the one packaged

for your system, you want to be certain to have all the fixes or to get some

commercial support, other choices are available at http://www.haproxy.com/.

Areas covered in this document

==============================

1) Quick build & install

2) Basic principles

3) Build environment

4) Dependencies

5) Advanced build options

6) How to install HAProxy

1) Quick build & install

========================

If you've already built HAProxy and are just looking for a quick reminder, here

are a few build examples :

- recent Linux system with all options, make and install :

$ make clean

$ make -j $(nproc) TARGET=linux-glibc \

USE_OPENSSL=1 USE_ZLIB=1 USE_LUA=1 USE_PCRE=1 USE_SYSTEMD=1

$ sudo make install

- FreeBSD and OpenBSD, build with all options :

$ gmake -j 4 TARGET=freebsd USE_OPENSSL=1 USE_ZLIB=1 USE_LUA=1 USE_PCRE=1

- embedded Linux, build using a cross-compiler :

$ make -j $(nproc) TARGET=linux-glibc USE_OPENSSL=1 USE_SLZ=1 USE_PCRE=1 \

CC=/opt/cross/gcc730-arm/bin/gcc ADDLIB=-latomic

- Build with static PCRE on Solaris / UltraSPARC :

$ make TARGET=solaris CPU=ultrasparc USE_STATIC_PCRE=1

For more advanced build options or if a command above reports an error, please

read the following sections.

2) Basic principles

===================

HAProxy uses a single GNU Makefile which supports options on the command line,

so that there is no need to hack a "configure" file to work on your system. The

makefile totally supports parallel build using "make -j <jobs>" where <jobs>

matches the number of usable processors, which on some platforms is returned by

the "nproc" utility. The explanations below may occasionally refer to some

options, usually in the form "name=value", which have to be passed to the

command line. This means that the option has to be passed after the "make"

command. For example :

$ make -j $(nproc) TARGET=generic USE_GZIP=1

One required option is TARGET, it must be set to a target platform name, which

provides a number of presets. The list of known platforms is displayed when no

target is specified. It is not strictly required to use the exact target, you

can use a relatively similar one and adjust specific variables by hand.

Most configuration variables are in fact booleans. Some options are detected and

enabled by default if available on the target platform. This is the case for all

those named "USE_<feature>". These booleans are enabled by "USE_<feature>=1"

and are disabled by "USE_<feature>=" (with no value). The last occurrence on the

command line overrides any previous one. Example :

$ make TARGET=generic USE_THREAD=

In case of error or missing TARGET, a help screen is displayed. It is also

possible to display a list of all known options using "make help".

3) Build environment

====================

HAProxy requires a working GCC or Clang toolchain and GNU make :

- GNU make >= 3.80. Note that neither Solaris nor OpenBSD's make work with

the GNU Makefile. If you get many syntax errors when running "make", you

may want to retry with "gmake" which is the name commonly used for GNU make

on BSD systems.

- GCC >= 3.4 (up to 10.1 tested). Older versions can be made to work with a

few minor adaptations if really needed. Newer versions may sometimes break

due to compiler regressions or behaviour changes. The version shipped with

your operating system is very likely to work with no trouble. Clang >= 3.0

is also known to work as an alternative solution. Recent versions may emit

a bit more warnings that are worth reporting as they may reveal real bugs.

- GNU ld (binutils package), with no particular version. Other linkers might

work but were not tested.

On debian or Ubuntu systems and their derivatives, you may get all these tools

at once by issuing the two following commands :

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

On Fedora, CentOS, RHEL and derivatives, you may get the equivalent packages

with the following command :

$ sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Please refer to your operating system's documentation for other systems.

It is also possible to build HAProxy for another system or platform using a

cross-compiler but in this case you probably already have installed these

tools.

Building HAProxy may require between 10 and 40 MB of free space in the

directory where the sources have been extracted, depending on the debugging

options involved.

4) Dependencies

===============

HAProxy in its basic form does not depend on anything beyond a working libc.

However a number of options are enabled by default, or are highly recommended,

and these options will typically involve some external components or libraries,

depending on the targeted platform.

Optional dependencies may be split into several categories :

- memory allocation

- regular expressions

- multi-threading

- password encryption

- cryptography

- compression

- lua

- device detection

- miscellaneous

4.1) Memory allocation

----------------------

By default, HAProxy uses the standard malloc() call provided by the libc. It

may also be built to use jemalloc, which is fast and thread-safe. In order to

use it, please add "-ljemalloc" to the ADDLIB variable. You may possibly also

need to append "-lpthread" and/or "-ldl" depending on the operating system.

4.2) Regular expressions

------------------------

HAProxy may make use regular expressions (regex) to match certain patterns. The

regex engine is provided by default in the libc. On some operating systems, it

might happen that the original regex library provided by the libc is too slow,

too limited or even bogus. For example, on older Solaris versions up to 8, the

default regex used not to properly extract group references, without reporting

compilation errors. Also, some early versions of the GNU libc used to include a

regex engine which could be slow or even crash on certain patterns.

If you plan on importing a particularly heavy configuration involving a lot of

regex, you may benefit from using some alternative regex implementations sur as

PCRE. HAProxy natively supports PCRE and PCRE2, both in standard and JIT

flavors (Just In Time). The following options are available depending on the

library version provided on your system :

- "USE_PCRE=1" : enable PCRE version 1, dynamic linking

- "USE_STATIC_PCRE=1" : enable PCRE version 1, static linking

- "USE_PCRE_JIT=1" : enable PCRE version 1 in JIT mode

- "USE_PCRE2=1" : enable PCRE version 2, dynamic linking

- "USE_STATIC_PCRE2=1" : enable PCRE version 2, static linking

- "USE_PCRE2_JIT=1" : enable PCRE version 2 in JIT mode

Both of these libraries may be downloaded from https://www.pcre.org/.

By default, the include and library paths are figured from the "pcre-config"

and "pcre2-config" utilities. If these ones are not installed or inaccurate

(for example when cross-compiling), it is possible to force the path to include

files using "PCRE_INC" and "PCRE2_INC" respectively, and the path to library

files using "PCRE_LIB" and "PCRE2_LIB" respectively. For example :

$ make TARGET=generic \

USE_PCRE2_JIT=1 PCRE2_INC=/opt/cross/include PCRE2_LIB=/opt/cross/lib

4.3) Multi-threading

--------------------

On some systems for which positive feedback was reported, multi-threading will

be enabled by default. When multi-threading is used, the libpthread library

(POSIX threading) will be used. If the target system doesn't contain such a

library, it is possible to forcefully disable multi-threading by adding

"USE_THREAD=" on the command line.

4.4) Password encryption

------------------------

Many systems provide password encryption functions used for authentication. On

some systems these functions are part of the libc. On others, they're part of a

separate library called "libcrypt". The default targets are pre-configured

based on which system needs the library. It is possible to forcefully disable

the linkage against libcrypt by adding "USE_LIBCRYPT=" on the command line, or

to forcefully enable it using "USE_LIBCRYPT=1".

4.5) Cryptography

-----------------

For SSL/TLS, it is necessary to use a cryptography library. HAProxy currently

supports the OpenSSL library, and is known to build ant work with branches

0.9.8, 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.1.0 and 1.1.1. OpenSSL follows a long-term

support cycle similar to HAProxy's, and each of the branches above receives its

own fixes, without forcing you to upgrade to another branch. There is no excuse

for staying vulnerable by not applying a fix available for your version. There

is always a small risk of regression when jumping from one branch to another

one, especially when it's very new, so it's preferable to observe for a while

if you use a different version than your system's defaults.

Two OpenSSL derivatives called LibreSSL and BoringSSL are reported to work as

well. While there are some efforts from the community to ensure they work well,

OpenSSL remains the primary target and this means that in case of conflicting

choices, OpenSSL support will be favored over other options.

In order to enable SSL/TLS support, simply pass "USE_OPENSSL=1" on the command

line and the default library present on your system will be used :

$ make TARGET=generic USE_OPENSSL=1

If you want to use a different version from the one provided by your system

(which is not recommended due to the risk of missing security fixes), it is

possible to indicate the path to the SSL include files using SSL_INC, and the

SSL library files using SSL_LIB. Example :

$ make TARGET=generic \

USE_OPENSSL=1 SSL_INC=/opt/ssl-1.1.1/include SSL_LIB=/opt/ssl-1.1.1/lib

In order to link OpenSSL statically against HAProxy, first download OpenSSL

from https://www.openssl.org/ then build it with the "no-shared" keyword and

install it to a local directory, so your system is not affected :

$ export STATICLIBSSL=/tmp/staticlibssl

$ ./config --prefix=$STATICLIBSSL no-shared

$ make && make install_sw

Then when building haproxy, pass that path via SSL_INC and SSL_LIB :

$ make TARGET=generic \

USE_OPENSSL=1 SSL_INC=$STATICLIBSSL/include SSL_LIB=$STATICLIBSSL/lib

When building with OpenSSL on some systems, you may also need to enable support

for the "libz" library, which is visible if the linker complains about function

"deflateInit()" not being found. In this case, simply append "ADDLIB=-lz" to

the command line.

It is worth mentioning that asynchronous cryptography engines are supported on

OpenSSL 1.1.0 and above. Such engines are used to access hardware cryptography

acceleration that might be present on your system.

4.6) Compression

----------------

HAProxy can compress HTTP responses before delivering them to clients, in order

to save network bandwidth. Two compression options are available. The first one

involves the widely known zlib library, which is very likely installed on your

system. In order to use zlib, simply pass "USE_ZLIB=1" to the command line. If

the library is not installed in your default system's path, it is possible to

specify the path to the include files using ZLIB_INC, and the path to the

library files using ZLIB_LIB :

$ make TARGET=generic \

USE_ZLIB=1 ZLIB_INC=/opt/zlib-1.2.11/include ZLIB_LIB=/opt/zlib-1.2.11/lib

However, zlib maintains an in-memory context for each compressed stream, which

is not always welcome when dealing with large sites. An alternative solution is

to use libslz instead, which doesn't consume memory, which is much faster, but

compresses slightly less efficiently. For this, please use "USE_SLZ=1", and

optionally make "SLZ_INC" and "SLZ_LIB" point to the library's include and

library paths, respectively.

Zlib is commonly found on most systems, otherwise updates can be retrieved from

http://www.zlib.net/. It is easy and fast to build, and new versions sometimes

provide better performance so it might be worth using an up-to-date one. Libslz

can be downloaded http://libslz.org/ and is even easier to build.

4.7) Lua

--------

Lua is an embedded programming language supported by HAProxy to provide more

advanced scripting capabilities. Only versions 5.3 and above are supported.

In order to enable Lua support, please specify "USE_LUA=1" on the command line.

Some systems provide this library under various names to avoid conflicts with

previous versions. By default, HAProxy looks for "lua5.3", "lua53", "lua". If

your system uses a different naming, you may need to set the library name in

the "LUA_LIB_NAME" variable.

If Lua is not provided on your system, it can be very simply built locally. It

can be downloaded from https://www.lua.org/, extracted and built, for example :

$ cd /opt/lua-5.3.5

$ make linux

The path to the include files and library files may be set using "LUA_INC" and

"LUA_LIB" respectively. For example :

$ make TARGET=generic \

USE_LUA=1 LUA_INC=/opt/lua-5.3.5/src LUA_LIB=/opt/lua-5.3.5/src

4.8) Device detection

---------------------

HAProxy supports several device detection modules relying on third party

products. Some of them may provide free code, others free libs, others free

evaluation licenses. Please read about their respective details in the

following files :

doc/DeviceAtlas-device-detection.txt for DeviceAtlas

doc/51Degrees-device-detection.txt for 51Degrees

doc/WURFL-device-detection.txt for Scientiamobile WURFL

4.9) Miscellaneous

------------------

Some systems have specificities. Usually these specificities are known and/or

detected and properly set for you. If you need to adjust the behaviour, here

are the extra libraries that may be referenced at build time :

- USE_RT=1 build with librt, which is sometimes needed on some systems

when using threads. It is set by default on Linux platforms,

and may be disabled using "USE_RT=" if your system doesn't

have one. You may have to set it as well if you face an error

indicating that clock_gettime() was not found.

- USE_DL=1 build with libdl, which is usually needed for Lua and OpenSSL

on Linux. It is automatically detected and may be disabled

using "USE_DL=", though it should never harm.

- USE_SYSTEMD=1 enables support for the sdnotify features of systemd,

allowing better integration with systemd on Linux systems

which come with it. It is never enabled by default so there

is no need to disable it.

4.10) Common errors

-------------------

Some build errors may happen depending on the options combinations or the

selected target. When facing build errors, if you know that your system is a

bit special or particularly old, start from TARGET=generic, it is easier to

start from there and fix the remaining issues than trying to degrade another

target. Common issues may include:

- clock_gettime() not found

=> your system needs USE_RT=1

- __sync_sub_and_fetch undefined in cache.o

=> your system needs either USE_PTHREAD_PSHARED=1 or USE_PRIVATE_CACHE=1

- many __sync_<something> errors in many files

=> your gcc is too old, build without threads and with private cache.

- many openssl errors

=> your OpenSSL version really is too old, do not enable OpenSSL

5) How to build HAProxy

=======================

This section assumes that you have already read section 2 (basic principles)

and section 3 (build environment). It often refers to section 4 (dependencies).

To build haproxy, you have to choose your target OS amongst the following ones

and assign it to the TARGET variable :

- linux-glibc for Linux kernel 2.6.28 and above

- linux-glibc-legacy for Linux kernel 2.6.28 and above without new features

- linux-musl for Linux kernel 2.6.28 and above with musl libc

- solaris for Solaris 10 and above

- freebsd for FreeBSD 5 to 12 (others untested)

- netbsd for NetBSD

- osx for Mac OS/X

- openbsd for OpenBSD 5.7 and above

- aix51 for AIX 5.1

- aix52 for AIX 5.2

- aix72-gcc for AIX 7.2 (using gcc)

- cygwin for Cygwin

- haiku for Haiku

- generic for any other OS or version.

- custom to manually adjust every setting

You may also choose your CPU to benefit from some optimizations. This is

particularly important on UltraSparc machines. For this, you can assign

one of the following choices to the CPU variable :

- i686 for intel PentiumPro, Pentium 2 and above, AMD Athlon (32 bits)

- i586 for intel Pentium, AMD K6, VIA C3.

- ultrasparc : Sun UltraSparc I/II/III/IV processor

- power8 : IBM POWER8 processor

- power9 : IBM POWER9 processor

- native : use the build machine's specific processor optimizations. Use with

extreme care, and never in virtualized environments (known to break).

- generic : any other processor or no CPU-specific optimization. (default)

Alternatively, you may just set the CPU_CFLAGS value to the optimal GCC options

for your platform. A second variable named SMALL_OPTS also supports passing a

number of defines and compiler options usually for small systems. For better

clarity it's recommended to pass the options which result in a smaller binary

(like memory limits or -Os) into this variable.

If you are building for a different system than the one you're building on,

this is called "cross-compiling". HAProxy supports cross-compilation pretty

well and tries to ease it by letting you adjust paths to all libraries (please

read section 4 on dependencies for more details). When cross-compiling, you

just need to pass the path to your compiler in the "CC" variable, and the path

to the linker in the "LD" variable. Most of the time, setting the CC variable

is enough since LD points to it by default.

By default the build process runs in quiet mode and hide the details of the

commands that are executed. This allows to more easily catch build warnings

and see what is happening. However it is not convenient at all to observe what

flags are passed to the compiler nor what compiler is involved. Simply append

"V=1" to the "make" command line to switch to verbose mode and display the

details again. It is recommended to use this option when cross-compiling to

verify that the paths are correct and that /usr/include is never invovled.

You may want to build specific target binaries which do not match your native

compiler's target. This is particularly true on 64-bit systems when you want

to build a 32-bit binary. Use the ARCH variable for this purpose. Right now

it only knows about a few x86 variants (i386,i486,i586,i686,x86_64), two

generic ones (32,64) and sets -m32/-m64 as well as -march=<arch> accordingly.

This variable is only used to set ARCH_FLAGS to preset values, so if you know

the arch-specific flags that your system needs, you may prefer to set

ARCH_FLAGS instead. Note that these flags are passed both to the compiler and

to the linker. For example, in order to build a 32-bit binary on an x86_64

Linux system with SSL support without support for compression but when OpenSSL

requires ZLIB anyway :

$ make TARGET=linux-glibc ARCH=i386 USE_OPENSSL=1 ADDLIB=-lz

Recent systems can resolve IPv6 host names using getaddrinfo(). This primitive

is not present in all libcs and does not work in all of them either. Support in

glibc was broken before 2.3. Some embedded libs may not properly work either,

thus, support is disabled by default, meaning that some host names which only

resolve as IPv6 addresses will not resolve and configs might emit an error

during parsing. If you know that your OS libc has reliable support for

getaddrinfo(), you can add USE_GETADDRINFO=1 on the make command line to enable

it. This is the recommended option for most Linux distro packagers since it's

working fine on all recent mainstream distros. It is automatically enabled on

Solaris 8 and above, as it's known to work.

If your system supports PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), then you

really should build with libpcre which is between 2 and 10 times faster than

other libc implementations. Regex are used for header processing (deletion,

rewriting, allow, deny). Please see section 4 about dependencies to figure

how to build with PCRE support.

It is possible to add native support for SSL, by passing "USE_OPENSSL=1" on the

make command line. The libssl and libcrypto will automatically be linked with

HAProxy. Some systems also require libz, so if the build fails due to missing

symbols such as deflateInit(), then try again with "ADDLIB=-lz". Please check

section 4 about dependencies for more information on how to build with OpenSSL.

HAProxy can compress HTTP responses to save bandwidth. Please see section 4

about dependencies to see the available libraries and associated options.

By default, the DEBUG variable is set to '-g' to enable debug symbols. It is

not wise to disable it on uncommon systems, because it's often the only way to

get a usable core when you need one. Otherwise, you can set DEBUG to '-s' to

strip the binary.

If the ERR variable is set to any non-empty value, then -Werror will be added

to the compiler so that any build warning will trigger an error. This is the

recommended way to build when developing, and it is expected that contributed

patches were tested with ERR=1.

The SSL stack supports session cache synchronization between all running

processes. This involves some atomic operations and synchronization operations

which come in multiple flavors depending on the system and architecture :

Atomic operations :

- internal assembler versions for x86/x86_64 architectures

- gcc builtins for other architectures. Some architectures might not

be fully supported or might require a more recent version of gcc.

If your architecture is not supported, you willy have to either use

pthread if supported, or to disable the shared cache.

- pthread (posix threads). Pthreads are very common but inter-process

support is not that common, and some older operating systems did not

report an error when enabling multi-process mode, so they used to

silently fail, possibly causing crashes. Linux's implementation is

fine. OpenBSD doesn't support them and doesn't build. FreeBSD 9 builds

and reports an error at runtime, while certain older versions might

silently fail. Pthreads are enabled using USE_PTHREAD_PSHARED=1.

Synchronization operations :

- internal spinlock : this mode is OS-independent, light but will not

scale well to many processes. However, accesses to the session cache

are rare enough that this mode could certainly always be used. This

is the default mode.

- Futexes, which are Linux-specific highly scalable light weight mutexes

implemented in user-space with some limited assistance from the kernel.

This is the default on Linux 2.6 and above and is enabled by passing

USE_FUTEX=1

- pthread (posix threads). See above.

If none of these mechanisms is supported by your platform, you may need to

build with USE_PRIVATE_CACHE=1 to totally disable SSL cache sharing. Then it

is better not to run SSL on multiple processes. Note that you don't need these

features if you only intend to use multi-threading and never multi-process.

If you need to pass other defines, includes, libraries, etc... then please

check the Makefile to see which ones will be available in your case, and

use/override the USE_* variables from the Makefile.

AIX 5.3 is known to work with the generic target. However, for the binary to

also run on 5.2 or earlier, you need to build with DEFINE="-D_MSGQSUPPORT",

otherwise __fd_select() will be used while not being present in the libc, but

this is easily addressed using the "aix52" target. If you get build errors

because of strange symbols or section mismatches, simply remove -g from

DEBUG_CFLAGS.

Building on AIX 7.2 works fine using the "aix72-gcc" TARGET. It adds two

special CFLAGS to prevent the loading of AIXs xmem.h and var.h. This is done

by defining the corresponding include-guards _H_XMEM and _H_VAR. Without

excluding those header-files the build fails because of redefinition errors.

Furthermore, the atomic library is added to the LDFLAGS to allow for

multithreading via USE_THREAD.

You can easily define your own target with the GNU Makefile. Unknown targets

are processed with no default option except USE_POLL=default. So you can very

well use that property to define your own set of options. USE_POLL can even be

disabled by setting USE_POLL="". For example :

$ gmake TARGET=tiny USE_POLL="" TARGET_CFLAGS=-fomit-frame-pointer

If you need to pass some defines to the preprocessor or compiler, you may pass

them all in the DEFINE variable. Example:

$ make TARGET=generic DEFINE="-DDEBUG_DONT_SHARE_POOLS -DDEBUG_MEMORY_POOLS"

The ADDINC variable may be used to add some extra include paths; this is

sometimes needed when cross-compiling. Similarly the ADDLIB variable may be

used to specifify extra paths to library files. Example :

$ make TARGET=generic ADDINC=-I/opt/cross/include ADDLIB=-L/opt/cross/lib64

6) How to install HAProxy

=========================

To install haproxy, you can either copy the single resulting binary to the

place you want, or run :

$ sudo make install

If you're packaging it for another system, you can specify its root directory

in the usual DESTDIR variable.

-- end