Table of Contents
Before upgrading from Netatalk 2 or 3 to Netatalk 4, please read the upgrading chapter in this manual.
Please have a look at the Netatalk homepage for the most up to date information on where to find the latest version of the software.
Binary packages of Netatalk are included in the package repositories of some Linux, BSD, and Solaris-like distributions. Installing Netatalk through this channel will give you the most seamless experience, with managed updates when new package versions are available.
You might also want to have a look at 3rd party package repositories for your operating system, such as rpmfind for Red Hat based Linux distributions, OpenCSW for Solaris and its descendants, and Homebrew or MacPorts for macOS.
Prepackaged tarballs with stable releases of the Netatalk source code are available on the Netatalk releases page on GitHub.
Downloading the Git repository can be done quickly and easily:
Make sure you have Git installed. which git should produce a path to git.
$which git/usr/bin/git
Now get the source:
$git clone https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk.git netatalk-codeCloning into 'netatalk-code'... remote: Enumerating objects: 41592, done. ... Resolving deltas: 100% (32227/32227), done.
This will create a local directory called
netatalk-code containing a complete and fresh
copy of the whole Netatalk source tree from the Git
repository.
If you don't specify a branch or tag, you will get the bleeding edge development code. In order to get the latest stable Netatalk 3.1 code, for instance, check out the branch named "branch-netatalk-3-1":
$git checkout branch-netatalk-3-1
In order to keep your repository copy updated, occasionally run:
$git pull
The default dbd CNID backend for netatalk uses Berkeley DB to store unique file identifiers. At the time of writing you need at least version 4.6.
The recommended version is 5.3, the final release under the permissive Sleepycat license, and therefore the most widely distributed version.
libevent
Internal event callbacks in the netatalk service controller daemon are built on libevent version 2.
Libgcrypt
The Libgcrypt library supplies the encryption for the standard User Authentication Modules (UAMs). They are: DHX2, DHCAST128 (a.k.a. DHX) and RandNum.
Netatalk can use the following third-party software to enhance its functionality.
ACL and LDAP
LDAP is an open and industry-standard user directory protocol that works in tandem with the advanced permissions scheme of ACL. On some operating systems ACL and LDAP libraries are built in to the system, while on others you have to install supporting packages to enable this functionality.
Avahi or mDNSresponder for Bonjour
Mac OS X 10.2 and later uses Bonjour (a.k.a. Zeroconf) for automatic service discovery. Netatalk can advertise AFP file sharing and Time Machine volumes by using Avahi or mDNSResponder.
When using Avahi, D-Bus is also required, and the Avahi library must have been built with D-Bus support.
cmark-gfm
CommonMark is used to translate markdown to plain text, which is useful for installing or packaging Netatalk's READMEs.
CrackLib
When using the Random Number UAMs and netatalk's own
afppasswd password manager, CrackLib can
help protect against setting weak passwords for authentication
with netatalk.
The CrackLib dictionary, which is sometimes distributed separately in a runtime package, is also a requirement.
D-Bus
D-Bus provides a mechanism for sending messages between
processes, used by multiple Netatalk features: Spotlight, Zeroconf
with Avahi, and the afpstats tool.
DocBook XSL and xsltproc
The Netatalk documentation, including this manual, are authored in XML format. DocBook XSL stylesheets and xsltproc are used to transcode the XML to other human-readable formats such as troff (for man pages), html, or pdf. Note that the DocBook XSL stylesheets have to be non-namespaced.
GLib and GIO
Used by the afpstats tool to
interface with D-Bus.
iconv
iconv provides conversion routines for many character encodings. Netatalk uses it to provide charsets it does not have built in conversions for, like ISO-8859-1. On glibc systems, Netatalk can use the glibc provided iconv implementation. Otherwise you can use the GNU libiconv implementation.
Kerberos V
Kerberos v5 is a client-server based authentication protocol invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With the Kerberos library, netatalk can produce the GSS UAM library for authentication with existing Kerberos infrastructure.
MySQL or MariaDB
By leveraging a MySQL-compatible client library, netatalk can be built with a MySQL CNID backend that is highly scalable and reliable. The administrator has to provide a separate database instance for use with this backend.
PAM provides a flexible mechanism for authenticating users. PAM was invented by SUN Microsystems. Linux-PAM is a suite of shared libraries that enable the local system administrator to choose how applications authenticate users.
Perl
Netatalk's administrative utility scripts rely on the Perl runtime, version 5.8 or later. The required Perl modules include IO::Socket::IP (asip-status) and Net::DBus (afpstats).
TCP wrappers
Wietse Venema's network logger, also known as TCPD or LOG_TCP.
Security options are: access control per host, domain and/or service; detection of host name spoofing or host address spoofing; booby traps to implement an early-warning system.
Tracker, or TinySPARQL / LocalSearch
Netatalk uses Tracker or its later incarnation TinySPARQL/LocalSearch as the metadata backend for Spotlight search indexing. The minimum required version is 0.7 as this was the first version to support SPARQL.
talloc / bison / flex
Samba's talloc library, a Yacc parser such as bison, and a lexer like flex are also required for Spotlight.
UnicodeData.txt
The build system uses Perl and the Unicode Character Database to generate Netatalk's Unicode character conversion sources.
Instructions on how to use the build system to configure and build netatalk source code are documented in the INSTALL.md file in the Netatalk source tree.
For examples of concrete steps to compile on specific operating systems, refer to the Compile Netatalk from Source appendix in this manual, which is automatically generated from the CI build scripts.
The Netatalk distribution comes with several operating system specific startup script templates that are tailored according to the options given to the build system before compiling. Currently, templates are provided for systemd, openrc, in addition to platform specific scripts for popular Linux distributions, BSD variants, Solaris descendants, and macOS.
When building from source, the Netatalk build system will attempt to
detect which init style is appropriate for your platform. You can also
configure the build system to install the specific type of startup
script(s) you want by specifying the with-init-style
option. For the syntax, please refer to the build system's help
text.
Since new Linux, *BSD, and Solaris-like distributions appear at regular intervals, and the startup procedure for the other systems mentioned above might change as well, it is a good idea to not blindly install a startup script but to confirm first that it will work on your system.
If you use Netatalk as part of a fixed setup, like a Linux distribution, an RPM or a BSD package, things will probably have been arranged properly for you. The previous paragraphs therefore apply mostly for people who have compiled Netatalk themselves.
The following daemon need to be started by whatever startup script mechanism is used:
In the absence of a startup script, you can also launch this daemon directly (as root), and kill it with SIGTERM when you are done with it.
Additionally, make sure that the configuration file
afp.conf is in the right place. You can inquire
netatalk where it is expecting the file to be by running the
netatalk -V command.
If you want to run AppleTalk services, you also need to start the atalkd daemon, plus the optional papd, timelord, and a2boot daemons. See the AppleTalk chapter in this manual for more information.
