Chapter 3. Compiling and Installing

Squid is designed to be portable and should compile on all major Unix systems, including Linux, BSD/OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, OSF/DUNIX/TRU-64, Mac OS/X, IRIX, and AIX. Squid also runs on Microsoft Windows. Please see Appendix E for instructions on compiling and running Squid on Windows.

Compiling Squid is relatively straightforward. If you've installed more than a few open source packages, you're probably already familiar with the procedure. You first use a program called ./configure to probe your system and then a program called make to do the actual compiling.

Before getting to that step, however, let's talk about tuning your system in preparation for Squid. Your operating system may have default resource limits that are too low for Squid to run correctly. Most importantly, you need to worry about the number of available file descriptors.