Time for action – compiling the source

After specifying our environment and building the requirements, we need to do the actual compilation. Compiling source code is very easy and is a matter of just one command:

make

We do not need to be the root or super user to execute this command. This command may take a considerable amount of time to execute, depending on the system hardware. Running make will produce a lot of output in the terminal. It may also produce a lot of compiler warnings which can safely be ignored in most cases.

If make ends with errors, we should check Squid bugzilla for similar problems. We can update an existing bug with our error report or create a new bug report if there is no similar bug already. For details on troubleshooting and completing bug reports, please refer to Chapter 12, Troubleshooting Squid.

If make ends without any errors, we can quickly proceed to the installation phase. We can also run make again to verify that everything is compiled successfully. Running make again should produce a lot of lines similar to the following:

Making all in compat
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/user/squid-source/compat'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/user/squid-source/compat'

What just happened?

We have just run the make command that will compile the source code of Squid and related modules, to generate executables, if it finishes without errors. The generated executables are ready to be installed now.