how to install memchached 1.2.2 from source

I have installed an instance of mem­chached ver­sion 1.2.2 on one of our servers (Debian etch) today and to keep you from spend­ing a whole after­noon, see my everything-step-by-step instruc­tion below.

Mem­chached is a dis­trib­uted hash map, which can be used for exam­ple to speed up any kind of web appli­ca­tion, see web­site for details. In our case, we want to use it as tem­po­rary data store. I will report about the expe­ri­ences in a lat­ter post.

intro­duc­tion

Always refer to this page for details, but I cre­ated a ver­sion with less text but includ­ing steps to really start from scratch.

All lines start­ing with # are com­mand lines, i.e. you need to type into a linux shell.
Out­put of any kind is always sur­rounded by ” even if it is mul­ti­line output.

con­tent

a. get libevent (needed to install mem­cached)
b. get mem­cached and ver­ify instal­la­tion
c. use and test mem­cached within Java with junit/ant

a. installing libevent 1.3

a.1. check for cur­rent ver­sion of libevent

a.1a.

Log in as root or get super user rights by call­ing su

# updat­edb
# locate libevent

If there is out­put includ­ing “libevent1” and/or “libevent-1″ (ignore pack­age files like *.deb) -> a.1b, oth­er­wise a.2

a.1b. remov­ing old libevent version

# apt-get remove –purge libevent1
# Y

# updat­edb
# locate libevent
Should now return noth­ing or pack­age files only, i.e. you are ready for installation

a.2. installing libevent 1.3

a.2a down­load­ing and unpacking

# cd /usr/local/src
# wget http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.3b.tar.gz
# tar zxvf libevent-1.3b.tar.gz
# cd libevent-1.3b

a.2b. con­fig­ur­ing

# ./configure
check the out­put, if it con­tains some­thing like “con­fig­ure: error: no accept­able C com­piler found in $PATH” -> a.2c. oth­er­wise a.2d.

a.2c. com­pil­ing

# apt-get install gcc

Redo a.2b.
I got out­put like “C com­piler can­not cre­ate exe­cuta­bles”, read­ing file ‘config.log’ did not help me at all. Googling finally did, as I found a forum entry, point­ing out a miss­ing lib.
So try this:

# apt-get install libc-dev

Redo a.2b.
If that did  not solve it… sorry … google on, there is no sense in going on with­out solv­ing this issue. :-/

a.2d. make it!

# make && make install

If you get some­thing like “-bash: make: com­mand not found” -> A.2e, oth­er­wise A.3.

a.2e.

# apt-get install make

Redo a.2d.

a.3. con­fig­u­ra­tion

Press the Esc key as you read [esc] in the com­mands below.

# vim /etc/ld.so.conf.d/libevent-i386.conf
# i/usr/local/lib/[esc]:wq
# ldconfig

b. install mem­chached and ver­ify installation

b.1. down­load, unpack and install memchached

# cd /usr/local/src
# wget http://danga.com/memcached/dist/memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
# tar zxvf memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
# cd memcached-1.2.2
# ./configure
# make && make install

After installing gcc and libc-dev in sec­tion a, this one went eas­ily for me — if you skipped sec­tion a and run in prob­lems here, please install gcc and libc-dev (see a.2c).

b.2. ver­ify instal­la­tion of memchached

b.2a. start mem­chached server

# mem­cached –u www-data –vv

Out­put should end with line “<3 server lis­ten­ing”. Per­fect!

b.2b test server

I will refer to this shell in front of you as server shell below. Now, open another shell on the same machine, I will refer to it a client shell.

# tel­net local­host 11211

You should see some­thing like “<7 new client con­nec­tion” on the server shell, switch back to client shell.

# set test1 1 10000 1
# a

You should see “STORED” on client shell and the two fol­low­ing lines on server shell
”<7 set test1 1 10000 1
>7 STORED”

Per­fect!
You did it, your mem­cached is up and run­ning

c. mem­cached and Java

I wrote a lit­tle test pack­age using a Java client library for mem­cached from here, together with junit and ant. You can down­load it to have a look how sim­ple using mem­cache is and to ver­ify your instal­la­tion with an included  junit test, auto­mated with an ant build file.