Netatalk Installation Quick Start
This guide covers installing Netatalk from source on UNIX-like operating systems.
Netatalk uses the Meson build system with Ninja as the backend.
Meson only supports out-of-tree builds, and must be passed a directory to put built and generated sources into. We’ll call that directory “build” here. It’s recommended to create a separate build directory for each configuration you might want to use.
Get the source code
To build from a release tarball, download and unpack the tarball.
tar xjf netatalk-*.tar.xz # unpack the sources
cd netatalk-* # change to the toplevel directory
To build from the Netatalk GitHub repo, make sure you have Git installed, then clone the source tree.
git clone https://github.com/netatalk/netatalk.git # clone the repository
cd netatalk # change to the repo directory
External software dependencies
Install software dependencies using your operating system’s package manager.
Required
| Package | Details |
|---|---|
| Berkeley DB | v4.6.0 or later (often packaged as bdb or sometimes db) |
| iniparser | v3.1 or later |
| libevent | v2.0 or later |
| libgcrypt | v1.2.3 or later |
Required to Build
| Package | Details |
|---|---|
| meson | v0.61.2 or later |
| ninja | Often packaged as ninja-build |
Required for Spotlight Support
| Package | Details |
|---|---|
| D-Bus | Also used by avahi and afpstats |
| talloc | |
| tracker OR localsearch | v0.12 or later |
| bison | |
| flex |
Optional
| Package | Details |
|---|---|
| avahi OR mDNSresponder | For Zeroconf support |
| cmark OR cmark-gfm | For generating documentation |
| cracklib and cracklib dictionary | For password strength check in afppasswd |
| GLib 2 and GIO | For afpstats support |
| Kerberos V | For krbV UAM support |
| libacl | For ACL support |
| libldap | For LDAP support |
| libpam | For PAM support |
| libtirpc OR libquota | For Quota support |
| Perl | For admin scripts |
| po4a | For localization of documentation |
| tcpwrap | For TCP wrapper support |
| UnicodeData.txt | For regenerating Unicode lookup tables |
Build the software
Use the meson command to compile and install Netatalk.
meson setup build # configure the build
meson compile -C build # build Netatalk
# Become root and install
sudo meson install -C build # install Netatalk
To uninstall Netatalk:
sudo ninja -C build uninstall # uninstall Netatalk
To test (requires the -Dwith-tests=true flag at configure time):
cd build && meson test
Configuration flags
When using Meson, to review the options which Meson chose, run:
meson configure
With additional arguments the meson setup build command can be used to
configure Netatalk according to user preference. All generic options passed to
this command take the form -Doption=value.
For example, to install Netatalk in a specific location:
meson setup build -Dprefix=/tmp/install
By default meson enables all Netatalk features if their dependencies are available. However, many features can be enabled or disabled at configure time.
If meson cannot find the some required dependencies at configure time then the user can also specify the path a library if it is installed in an unconventional location.
Please see meson_options.txt for full details of all Netatalk-specific options, and the Meson documentation for details of generic Meson options.
See also
The Netatalk manual has further resources to aid building and installation.
- Installation chapter: detailed descriptions of each dependency
- Compilation chapter: concrete build steps for each supported operating system
