Installing Netatalk on Alpine Linux
Install the latest Netatalk
The easiest way to get Netatalk on Alpine Linux is to install the netatalk package with apk.
For building and installing from source yourself, for instance to get a newer version, follow the guides linked here.
Prepare
Many of the packages that Netatalk rely on, including netatalk itself, are in Alpine’s Community repository. This repository may be disabled by default, in which case you need to enable it before attempting to install the required packages.
See the Alpine Linux Wiki for more information.
Autotools
Below follows the build instructions for the legacy Autotools build system, used in netatalk 3.2 and earlier. In most cases, you want to follow the instructions in the links at the top of this page to install a later version instead.
Packages required for bootstrapping the build system:
apk add autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig
Packages required for building:
apk add avahi-dev build-base cups cups-dev db-dev gcc libgcrypt-dev openssl-dev
Optional packages:
apk add acl-dev cracklib-dev krb5-dev libtirpc-dev openldap-dev
Berkeley DB
As of Alpine 3.13.0 (Jan 14, 2021), BDB is officially a deprecated package.
At the time of writing db-dev still lives on in the Alpine repository, however. In the worst case, building BDB is always an option.
Avahi
If you see Avahi initialization errors, the avahi-daemon may need to be launched manually. Do this if zeroconf service discovery doesn’t work out of the box.
Build
First, bootstrap the autotools build system:
./bootstrap
Second, configure the build system:
./configure
Or, if you installed all the optional packages:
./configure --enable-openrc --enable-krbV-uam --with-cracklib --with-libtirpc
Third, compile and link the code:
make
Finally, install the compiled binaries:
make install
Run
One off start/stop of netatalk daemons
rc-service netatalk start
rc-service netatalk stop
Enable and disable startup on system boot
rc-update add netatalk default
rc-update del netatalk default
Footnotes
This is a mirror of the Netatalk GitHub Wiki. Please visit the original page if you want to correct an error or contribute new contents.
Last updated 2025-08-30
