Time for action – running the configure command

Now that we have had a brief look at several of the available options, we can layout the options for the environment for which we are building Squid. Now, we are ready to run the configure command with the following options:

./configure --prefix=/opt/squid/ --with-logdir=/var/log/squid/ --with-pidfile=/var/run/squid.pid --enable-storeio=ufs,aufs --enable-removal-policies=lru,heap --enable-icmp --enable-useragent-log --enable-referer-log --enable-cache-digests --with-large-files

The preceding command will run for a while, probing the system for various capabilities and making decisions on the basis of the available libraries and modules. The configure writes debugging output to the config.log file in the same directory. It is always wise to check the config.log for any errors which may have occurred while running the configure command.

If everything goes fine, configure will generate the makefiles in several directories which will be required for compiling the source code in the next step.

What just happened?

Running the configure program with the options mentioned in the previous code example, will generate the makefiles needed to compile the Squid source code and source code of the modules enabled. It will also generate the config.log and config.status files. All the messages which are generated during the running of the configure program are logged to the config.log file. The config.status file is an executable which can be run to recreate the makefiles.

Have a go hero – debugging configure errors

In the Squid source directory, run the configure command, as shown in the following code:

./configure --enable-storeio='aufs,disk'

Now try to check what went wrong and fix the errors.