Do It Yourself

The following guides outline building Cyrus IMAP from a fresh clone of the GIT repository’s branches, or a tarball of a released version.

Warning

The level of technical difficulty involved with home-brew or DIY Cyrus IMAP versions is high.

You are specifically requested not to build your own unless you have an appropriate comprehension of dependencies and building those yourself if you have to.

From GIT

Clone the GIT repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:cyrusimap/cyrus-imapd.git

Check out the desired branch or revision:

$ git branch -la
* master
  (...snip...)
  remotes/origin/cyrus-imapd-2.3
  remotes/origin/cyrus-imapd-2.4
  remotes/origin/cyrus-imapd-2.5
$ git checkout $BRANCH

Continue with Build Dependencies.

From Tarball

Download the latest stable tarball : version 3.10.0.

Extract the tarball:

$ tar xzvf cyrus-imapd-x.y.z.tar.gz

Continue with Build Dependencies.

Build Dependencies

If you run an operating system or Linux distribution that already includes packages for Cyrus IMAP, then the build dependencies for Cyrus IMAP are specified in the packaging specification for that package.

To install build dependencies on a Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS system for example, you can run the following commands:

# yum install yum-utils
# yum-builddep cyrus-imapd

Consult the upstream documentation of your platform for further information on the availability of such commands and their usage.

Required Build Dependencies

The following list includes the names of packages used in RPM-based distributions:

autoconf 2.63 or higher

automake

bison

cyrus-sasl-devel

flex

gcc

gperf

libtool version 2.2.6 or higher

libuuid-devel

openssl-devel (see :task:`29`) version 0.9.4 or higher

pkgconfig

Optional Build Dependencies

The following build dependencies are optional, and enable functionality, Cyrus IMAP code maintenance tasks or documentation rendering.

CUnit-devel

Development headers for compiling Cyrus IMAP’s unit tests, from http://cunit.sourceforge.net/.

Used for make check.

cyrus-sasl-plain version 2.1.7 or higher

Cyrus SASL package that ships the library required to pass Cyrus IMAP’s PLAIN authentication unit tests, from http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/sasl-library.html

Used with make check.

cyrus-sasl-md5 version 2.1.7 or higher

Cyrus SASL library required to pass Cyrus IMAP’s DIGEST-MD5 authentication unit tests, from http://asg.web.cmu.edu/sasl/sasl-library.html

Used with make check.

db4-devel or libdb-devel version 3.0.55 or higher

Note

Berkeley DB support has been dropped in versions of Cyrus IMAP equal to or higher than Cyrus IMAP 3.0.

Berkely DB backend for Cyrus IMAP databases, from https://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html.

Note

The use of Berkely DB for Cyrus IMAP databases is discouraged, and is likely to be obsoleted.

db4-utils or libdb-utils version 3.0.55 or higher

Note

Berkeley DB support has been dropped in versions of Cyrus IMAP equal to or higher than Cyrus IMAP 3.0.

Utilities for Berkeley DB databases, from https://www.oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/index.html, needed to pass unit tests.

Used with make check.

groff

jansson-devel

Development headers for Jansson, a C-library for JSON, from http://www.digip.org/jansson/.

Version 2.0 or higher is required for the event notifications feature.

Version 2.3 or higher is required for HTTP.

Configure options: --enable-event-notifications and --enable-http.

Note

Specifying the configure option --enable-event-notifications without having Jansson development headers installed will not cause ./configure to fail.

krb5-devel

Development headers required to enable Kerberos v5 authentication capabilities for Cyrus IMAP, from http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/.

Otherwise also known as the authentication mechanism GSSAPI.

Configure option: --with-krbimpl=mit

libical-devel

Important

libical >= 0.48 is required for scheduling support.

from http://freeassociation.sourceforge.net/

Note

Linux distributions Enterprise Linux 6 and Debian Squeeze are known to ship outdated libical packages versions 0.43 and 0.44 respectively. The platforms will not support scheduling.

libxml2-devel

mariadb-devel or mysql-devel

MariaDB or MySQL development headers, to allow Cyrus IMAP to use either as the backend for its databases.

mariadb-devel from http://mariadb.org

mysql-devel from http://www.mysql.com

Configure option: --with-mysql

New in version 2.5.0.

Configure options: --with-mysql-incdir, --with-mysql-libdir

Prior to version 2.5.

net-snmp-devel version 4.2 or higher

openldap-devel

Development headers to enable ptloader to interface with LDAP directly, for canonification of login usernames to mailbox names, and verification of login usernames, ACL subjects and group membership, from http://www.openldap.org/.

Configure option: --with-ldap

perl(ExtUtils::MakeMaker)

Perl library to assist in building extensions to Perl, from http://search.cpan.org/dist/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/.

Configure option: --with-perl

perl-devel version 5 or higher

Perl development headers to allow building binary perl libraries, from http://www.perl.org/.

Configure option: --with-perl

postgresql-devel

sqlite-devel

tcp_wrappers

transfig

valgrind

Continue with Configure the Build

Configure the Build

$ autoreconf -vi
$ ./configure [options]

Check the summary after ./configure completes successfully. The following segment shows the defaults in version 2.5.0, ran on a system with all mandatory and optional build dependencies installed, so yours may (read: will) differ:

Cyrus Imapd configured components

    event notification: yes
    gssapi:             yes
    autocreate:         no
    idled:              no
    http:               no
    kerberos V4:        no
    murder:             no
    nntpd:              no
    replication:        no
    sieve:              yes

External dependencies:
    ldap:               no
    openssl:            yes
    pcre:               yes

Database support:
    bdb:                yes
    mysql:              no
    postgresql:         no
    sqlite:             no

To view additional options, and disable or enable specific features, please see:

# ./configure --help