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16.1. Installing memcached

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

To install memcached on a RedHat, Fedora or CentOS host, use yum: 

root-shell> yum install memcached

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

To install on OpenSolaris, use the pkg command to install the SUNWmemcached package: 

root-shell> pkg install SUNWmemcached

You may also find memcached in the Coolstack project. For more details, see http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/.

On other Unix-based platforms, including Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and Mac OS X, and Linux distributions not mentioned already, you will need to 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 website.

To build memcached, follow these steps:

  1. Extract the memcached source package: 

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

  2. Change to the memcached-1.2.5 directory: 

    shell> cd memcached-1.2.5

  3. Run configure 

    shell> ./configure

    Some additional options you may want to specify to configure:

    • If you want to specify a different installation directory, use the --prefix option: 

      shell> ./configure --prefix=/opt

      The default is to use the /usr/local directory.

    • If you have installed libevent and configure cannot find the library, use the --with-libevent option to specify the location of the installed library.

    • To build a 64-bit version of memcached (which will allow you to use a single instance with a large RAM allocation), use --enable-64bit.

    • To enable multi-threading support in memcached, which will improve the response times on servers with a heavy load, use --enable-threads.

  4. Run make to build memcached: 

    shell> make

  5. Run make install to install memcached: 

    shell> make install