Installation¶
To install your own copy of Unbound you have two options: Use the version provided by your package manager, or download the source and building it yourself.
Installing via the package manager is the easiest option, and on most systems even trivial. The downside is the distributed version can be outdated for some distributions or not have all the compile-time options included that you want. Building and compiling Unbound yourself ensures that you have the latest version and all the compile-time options you desire.
If you’re a first-time user we recommend installing via a package manager.
Installing with a Package Manager¶
Most package managers maintain a version of Unbound, although this version can be outdated if this package has not been updated recently. If you like to upgrade to the latest version, we recommend compiling Unbound yourself.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS¶
Installing Unbound with the built-in package manager should be as easy as:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install unbound
This gives you a compiled and running version of Unbound ready to be configured.
macOS Big Sur¶
In this tutorial we make use of the Brew package installer for MacOS. Install
brew and, if you’ve never used brew before, give their website a read.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Then use brew to install Unbound.
brew install unbound
This gives you a compiled and running version of Unbound ready to be configured.
Building from source/Compiling¶
To compile Unbound on any system you need to have the openssl and expat
libraries, and their header files. To include the header files we need to get
the development version, usually called libssl-dev and libexpat1-dev
respectively.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS¶
First of all, we need our copy of the Unbound code, so we download the tarball of the latest version and untar it.
wget https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/unbound-latest.tar.gz
tar xzf unbound-latest.tar.gz
We’ll need some tools, such as a compiler and the make program.
Note
During installations with the package manager, a screen will come up asking which services need to be restarted. Using the defaults for this is fine.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential
The library components Unbound needs are: libssl libexpat, of which we
need the “dev” version. Unbound also uses libldns, but this is included in
the tarball we’ve already downloaded.
sudo apt install -y libssl-dev
sudo apt install -y libexpat1-dev
We’ll also need the tools to build the actual program. For this, Unbound uses
make and internally it uses flex and yacc, which we need to
download as well.
sudo apt-get install -y bison
sudo apt-get install -y flex
With all the requirements met, we can now start the compilation process in the
Unbound directory. The first step here is configuring. With ./configure
-h you can look at the extensive list of configuration options for Unbound.
A nice feature is that configure will tell you what it’s missing during
configuration.
A common error is for the paths to the two libraries we just installed, which
can be manually specified with --with-ssl= and --with-libexpat=.
./configure
When configure gives no errors, we can continue to actually compiling Unbound. For this Unbound uses make. Be warned that compiling might take a while.
make
When we have a successful compilation, we can install Unbound to make available for the machine.
sudo make install
We now have fully compiled and installed version of Unbound, and continue to testing it.
Please note that the default configuration file is located at
/usr/local/etc/unbound/unbound.conf and created during the
make step. This file contains all possible configuration options for
Unbound.
macOS Big Sur¶
In this tutorial we make use of the brew package installer for MacOS. Install brew and give their website a read if you’ve never used brew before.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Then we use brew to install wget.
brew install wget
We can the use wget to download the latest version of Unbound from repository and unpack it.
wget https://nlnetlabs.nl/downloads/unbound/unbound-latest.tar.gz
tar xzf unbound-latest.tar.gz
To compile Unbound on MacOS (or anything really), we need to install the Mac specific development tools called “Xcode”. This is available on the app store and requires ~12 GB space on the hard disk. Alternatively, if you don’t want multiple Gigabytes of largely unused space on your hard disk a slimmed down version also exists called the “Command Line Tools”. This includes all the tools to compile on a Mac can also be installed via the terminal.
xcode-select --install
This command will open a window where the selection can be made of what to install. If you just want the Command Line Tools select this option.
To verify that Xcode is installed correctly we check that we have the gcc compiler by asking for the version.
gcc --version
Next we install the required libraries using brew. Note that when
installing these brew will tell you the path to where it has
installed the library. The default is the /opt/homebrew/Cellar/ directory,
which can become important in the configure step.
brew install openssl@1.1
brew install expat
With all the requirements met, we can now start the compilation process in the
Unbound directory. The first step here is configuring. With ./configure
-h you can look at the extensive list of configuration options for Unbound.
A nice feature is that configure will tell you what it’s missing
during configuration.
A common error is for the paths to the two libraries we just installed, which
can be manually specified with --with-ssl= and --with-libexpat=.
./configure
Or alternatively, when configure cannot find libssl and
libexpat and brew installed them at the default directory (make
sure you fill in the correct version, at the time of writing the latest version
of openssl is 1.1.1k and of libexapt is 2.3.0).
./configure --with-ssl=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/openssl@1.1/1.1.1k/ \
--with-libexpat=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/expat/2.3.0
When configure gives no errors, we can continue to actually compiling Unbound. For this Unbound uses make. Be warned that compiling might take a while.
make
When we have a successful compilation, we can install Unbound to make available for the machine.
sudo make install
We now have fully compiled and installed version of Unbound, and can continue to testing it.
Testing¶
A simple test to determine if the installation was successful is to invoke the
unbound command with the -V option, which is
the “version” option.
This shows the version and build options used, as well as proving that the
install was successful.
You may have to use sudo to run this, depending on the installation.
unbound -V
If all the previous steps were successful we can continue to configuring our Unbound instance.
Another handy trick you can use during testing is to run Unbound in the
foreground using the -d option and increase the verbosity
level using the -v option multiple times.
This allows you to see steps Unbound takes and also where it fails.
Another useful, more detailed trick in combination with the foreground is to
make Unbound log on the foreground.
To do this, the following line needs to be added to the configuration file.
server:
use_syslog: no
Now that Unbound is installed we can continue to configuring it.