15.6.1. Installing memcached

You can build and install memcached from the source code directly, or you can use an existing operating system package or installation.

Installing memcached from a Binary Distribution

To install memcached on a Red Hat, or Fedora host, use yum:

root-shell> yum install memcached

Note

On CentOS, you may be able to obtain a suitable RPM from another source, or use the source tarball.

To install memcached on a Debian or Ubuntu host, use apt-get:

root-shell> apt-get install memcached

To install memcached on a Gentoo host, use emerge:

root-shell> emerge install memcached

Building memcached from Source

On other Unix-based platforms, including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Mac OS X, and Linux distributions not mentioned already, you must install from source. For Linux, make sure you have a 2.6-based kernel, which includes the improved epoll interface. For all platforms, ensure that you have libevent 1.1 or higher installed. You can obtain libevent from libevent web page.

You can obtain the source for memcached from memcached Web site.

To build memcached, follow these steps:

Extract the memcached source package:

shell> gunzip -c memcached-1.2.5.tar.gz | tar xf -

Change to the memcached-1.2.5 directory:
```
shell> cd memcached-1.2.5
```
Run configure
```
shell> ./configure
```
Some additional options you might specify to the configure:
- --prefix
  
  To specify a different installation directory, use the --prefix option:
```
shell> ./configure --prefix=/opt
```
  The default is to use the /usr/local directory.
- --with-libevent
  
  If you have installed libevent and configure cannot find the library, use the --with-libevent option to specify the location of the installed library.
- --enable-64bit
  
  To build a 64-bit version of memcached (which enables you to use a single instance with a large RAM allocation), use --enable-64bit.
- --enable-threads
  
  To enable multi-threading support in memcached, which improves the response times on servers with a heavy load, use --enable-threads. You must have support for the POSIX threads within your operating system to enable thread support. For more information on the threading support, see Section 15.6.2.7, "memcached Thread Support".
- --enable-dtrace
  
  memcached includes a range of DTrace threads that can be used to monitor and benchmark a memcached instance. For more information, see Section 15.6.2.5, "Using memcached and DTrace".
Run make to build memcached:
```
shell> make
```
Run make install to install memcached:
```
shell> make install
```