How to Compile Brotli from Source on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Brotli is a generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using a combination of a modern variant of the LZ77 algorithm, Huffman coding and 2nd order context modeling, with a compression ratio comparable to the best currently available general-purpose compression methods. It is similar in speed with deflate but offers more dense compression. It is open-sourced under the MIT License. You can browse its source code on Github. The specification of the Brotli Compressed Data Format is defined in RFC 7932.

This tutorial shows how to compile Brotli compression library from source on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).

Requirements

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system.
• Non root user with sudo access.

Initial steps

Check the Ubuntu version.

lsb_release -ds
# Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS

Set up the timezone.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Update your opereting system packages.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Build Brotli

Install build tools and required packages.

sudo apt install -y build-essential gcc make bc sed autoconf automake libtool git apt-transport-https tree

Clone Brotli repository.

git clone https://github.com/google/brotli.git

Navigate to Brotli source tree directory.

cd brotli

Create manual page for Brotli command.

sudo cp ~/brotli/docs/brotli.1 /usr/share/man/man1 && sudo gzip /usr/share/man/man1/brotli.1

Check the man page.

man brotli

To generate Autotools configure file run ./bootstrap command first.

./bootstrap

After the above command, you should have access to usual C program build steps: configure, make and make install available.

For help, you can run ./configure --help command. Now we are ready to build Brotli with the following instructions.

The basic commands to build and install brotli are:

./configure –prefix=/usr \
            –bindir=/usr/bin \
            –sbindir=/usr/sbin \
            –libexecdir=/usr/lib/brotli \
            –libdir=/usr/lib/brotli \
            –datarootdir=/usr/share \
            –mandir=/usr/share/man/man1 \
            –docdir=/usr/share/doc

make
sudo make install

After the successful build process, you can check Brotli version.

brotli –version
# brotli 1.0.6

To see help about brotli command, you can run:

brotli -h

Links

About Blago Eres

Blago Eres is a freelance Web Developer, Linux System Administrator and Technical Writer with more than 3 years of experience. Blago is skilled at RHEL/CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Web Servers, Database Servers, HTTP, PHP, JavaScript, Load Balancing, Caching etc.