section_2.md

Compiling

This description demonstrates the building steps on the upstream repository, but you can apply these steps on your forked repository as well.

Building

1. Clone your forked repository locally

git clone https://github.com/balabit/syslog-ng.git

2. Step into the directory syslog-ng directory and run autogen.sh:

./autogen.sh

This script will clone the Git submodules and initialize the build system. The result of the execution should be a configure script.

3. Create build directory We prefer to build syslog-ng in a dedicated directory, so your Git repo is kept tidy.

mkdir build
cd build

4. Run the configure scipt:

../configure --enable-debug --prefix=$HOME/install/syslog-ng

You can pass additional parameters to configure, but these are the most common ones. If you run ../configure --help you can see all the valid parameters. The result of the configuration process is several new Makefiles in your build directory.

5. Run make:

make -j

The -j flag will parallelize the compilation process. If make works for you (without -j), but make -j does not, that is a bug.

Expected outcome

You should have a freshly built syslog-ng by the end of this step.

Cleanup

You can execute make clean to remove the build artifacts. make distclean will also remove the configure script. You can also completely remove the content of your build directory.