strongSwan Installation Documentation¶

• Table of contents
• strongSwan Installation Documentation
  • Distribution packages
  • Compile yourself
    • Linux Kernel requirements
    • Building strongSwan
    • Building strongSwan from the Git repository
    • Building strongSwan on other platforms
    • Monolithic Builds
      • Static Builds
  • Configuration Management for strongSwan
    • Chef
    • Puppet

Distribution packages¶

There are currently packages for:

• Arch Linux
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• openSUSE
• Gentoo
• Fedora
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS via EPEL

• FreeBSD
• Homebrew (macOS)

Compile yourself¶

Linux Kernel requirements¶

strongSwan should run on most distros' kernels. If you build your own kernel, include the required modules.

Building strongSwan¶

The GNU build system (Autotools) is used to build strongSwan.

There is an ever growing list of configure options available (note that many of these are enabled by default, and please check ./configure --help for the options actually available for your release).

Refer to the list of plugins to learn more about the plugins enabled with the above options.

Note: Some plugins have dependencies on third-party libraries. To compile such plugins the header files of those libraries are required. Make sure these are installed on your system, e.g. by installing the appropriate -dev package on Debian-based systems. Otherwise, the configure script will complain that it can't find the library or header files.

The build procedure is as with any autotools project:

1. Download strongSwan:
   

    wget http://download.strongswan.org/strongswan-x.x.x.tar.bz2
   

2. Unpack the tarball, navigate into the directory:
   

    tar xjvf strongswan-x.x.x.tar.bz2; cd strongswan-x.x.x
   

3. Configure strongSwan using some of the available options (refer to ./configure --help):
   

    ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --<your-options>
   

4. Build the sources and install the binaries as root:
   

    make
    sudo make install
   

Building strongSwan from the Git repository¶

To build strongSwan from the Git repository additional tools and steps are required, check source:HACKING for details.

Building strongSwan on other platforms¶

• strongSwan on FreeBSD
• strongSwan on Mac OS X
• strongSwan on Android

Monolithic Builds¶

Plugins can be included in their associated library in a so called monolithic build (--enable-monolithic). That way it's not necessary to
distribute separate shared object files for each plugin but only the major libraries and executables. The plugins that are loaded at runtime
may still be controlled with the options described here.

Static Builds¶

Since 5.5.3, a static build that only relies on third-party libraries, i.e. in which our own libraries and plugins are all statically linked into the
executables, can be achieved by configuring with --disable-shared --enable-static --enable-monolithic.

Including third-party static libraries requires manual modification of the Makefiles due to limitations of our build system (see the Makefile
for the fuzzzing targets for an example, source:fuzz/Makefile.am).

Configuration Management for strongSwan¶

If you use CM to manage software, there are some options available to help configure strongSwan.

Chef¶

Useful cookbooks include:

• strongswanaws
• strongswan-base

Puppet¶

Useful modules include:

• Nextdoor/strongswan
• jpds/strongswan