How to install BIRD
===================

There are packages available for most of the existing distributions, and it is
possibly a cleaner way to install BIRD than manually.

To install BIRD manually from the source tarball, you need to first build it.

$ ./configure
$ make

After this, you get binaries bird, birdc and birdcl which will run perfectly
from wherever you put them. You can install them to the system paths if you want.

# make install

Default location for configuration file is /usr/local/etc/bird.conf and
for control socket is /usr/local/var/run/bird.ctl . You can change that
by --prefix, --sysconfdir and --runstatedir configure options, e.g.:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --runstatedir=/run

To compile current development BIRD source code from Git repository, you
also need Git (to download the source code) and Autoconf (to generate
the configure script and associated files using 'autoreconf' tool):

$ git clone https://gitlab.labs.nic.cz/labs/bird/
$ cd bird
$ autoreconf

Then continue as in usual installation above.

For debugging and development, it's recommended to use the -l flag for BIRD
binaries to use bird.conf and bird.ctl in the current directory, instead of
system-wide installation of an unstable version.


Requirements
============

For compiling BIRD you need these programs and libraries:

 - GNU C Compiler (or LLVM Clang) capable of compiling C11 code
 - GNU Make
 - GNU Bison (at least 3.0)
 - GNU M4
 - Flex

 - ncurses library
 - GNU Readline library
 - libssh library (optional, for RPKI-Router protocol)

For compiling BIRD documentation you also need:

 - Linuxdoc-Tools
 - LaTeX

$ make docs
