PowerDNS is copyright © 2001-2023 by PowerDNS.COM BV and lots of contributors, using the GNU GPLv2 license (see NOTICE for the exact license and exception used).

All documentation can be found on https://doc.powerdns.com/

This file may lag behind at times. For most recent updates, always check https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/changelog/

Another good place to look for information is: https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/appendices/compiling.html

To file bugs, head towards: https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/issues

But please check if the issue is already reported there first.

DOCKER

This README is mirrored from GitHub to dockerhub. For information about our Docker images, please refer to https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/blob/master/Docker-README.md

SOURCE CODE / GIT

Source code is available on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns.git

This repository contains the sources for the PowerDNS Recursor, the PowerDNS Authoritative Server, and dnsdist (a powerful DNS loadbalancer). All three can be built from this repository. However, all three released separately as .tar.bz2, .deb and .rpm.

The different releases can be built by the help of pdns-builder, which uses a docker-based build process. To get started with this, run these commands in the root of this repository:

git submodule init
git submodule update
./builder/build.sh

This will bring up a USAGE-page which will explain how to build the different releases.

COMPILING Authoritative Server

The PowerDNS Authoritative Server depends on Boost, OpenSSL and Lua, and requires a compiler with C++-2017 support.

On Debian 9, the following is useful:

apt install g++ libboost-all-dev libtool make pkg-config default-libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev libluajit-5.1-dev python3-venv

When building from git, the following packages are also required:

apt install autoconf automake ragel bison flex

For Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver), the following packages should be installed:

apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev luajit lua-yaml-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libtolua-dev lua5.3 autoconf automake ragel bison flex g++ libboost-all-dev libtool make pkg-config libssl-dev lua-yaml-dev libyaml-cpp-dev libluajit-5.1-dev libcurl4 gawk libsqlite3-dev python3-venv
# For DNSSEC ed25519 (algorithm 15) support with --with-libsodium
apt install libsodium-dev
# If using the gmysql (Generic MySQL) backend
apt install default-libmysqlclient-dev
# If using the gpgsql (Generic PostgreSQL) backend
apt install libpq-dev
# If using --enable-systemd (will create the service scripts so it can be managed with systemctl/service)
apt install libsystemd0 libsystemd-dev
# If using the geoip backend
apt install libmaxminddb-dev libmaxminddb0 libgeoip1 libgeoip-dev

Then generate the configure file:

autoreconf -vi

To compile a very clean version, use:

./configure --with-modules="" --disable-lua-records
make
# make install

This generates a PowerDNS Authoritative Server binary with no modules built in.

See https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/backends/index.html for a list of available modules.

When ./configure is run without --with-modules, the bind and gmysql module are built-in by default and the pipe-backend is compiled for runtime loading.

To add multiple modules, try:

./configure --with-modules="bind gmysql gpgsql"

Note that you will need the development headers for PostgreSQL as well in this case.

See https://doc.powerdns.com/authoritative/appendices/compiling.html for more details.

If you run into C++11-related symbol trouble, please try passing CPPFLAGS=-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 (or 1) to ./configure to make sure you are compatible with the installed dependencies.

Compiling the Recursor

See README.md in pdns/recursordist/.

Compiling dnsdist

See README-dnsdist.md in pdns/.

Building the HTML documentation

The HTML documentation (as seen on the PowerDNS docs site) is built from ReStructured Text (rst) files located in docs. They are compiled into HTML files using Sphinx, a documentation generator tool which is built in Python.

Install the dependencies under "COMPILING", and run autoreconf if you haven't already:

autoreconf -vi

Enter the docs folder, and use make to build the HTML docs.

cd docs
make html-docs

The HTML documentation will now be available in html-docs.

FreeBSD Notes

You need to compile using gmake - regular make only appears to work, but doesn't in fact. Use gmake, not make.

The clang compiler installed through FreeBSD's package manager does not expose all of the C++17 features needed under the default std=gnuc++14. Force the compiler to use std=c++17 mode instead.

export CXXFLAGS=-std=c++17

macOS Notes

PowerDNS Authoritative Server is available through Homebrew:

brew install pdns

If you want to compile yourself, the dependencies can be installed using Homebrew. You need to tell configure where to find OpenSSL, too.

brew install boost lua pkg-config ragel openssl
./configure --with-modules="" PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib/pkgconfig
make -j4

Additionally, for PostgreSQL support, run brew install postgresql and add --with-modules="gpgsql" to ./configure. For MySQL support, run brew install mariadb and add --with-modules="gmysql" to ./configure.

Linux notes

None really.