strongSwan Installation Documentation¶

Live testing system¶

We have built a small test system to run strongSwan without installation or configuration. It is based on a UML kernel, two small OpenWRT images and should run on any x86 Linux system out of the box.

Distribution packages¶

There are currently packages for:

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

Compile yourself¶

Linux Kernel requirements¶

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

Building strongSwan¶

Since the release of strongSwan 4.x the GNU build system (Autotools) is used to build strongSwan.

There is a growing list of configure options available:

• Autoconf options for current release

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

The build procedure is as with any autotools project:

1. Download strongSwan:
   

    wget http://download.strongswan.org/strongswan-4.x.x.tar.bz2
   

2. Unpack the tarball:
   

    tar xjvf strongswan-4.x.x.tar.bz2; cd strongswan-4.x.x
   

3. Configure strongSwan using some of the options above:
   

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

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

    make
    sudo make install
   

Building strongSwan on other platforms¶

• strongSwan on FreeBSD (IKEv2 only)
• strongSwan on Mac OS X (IKEv2 only)
• strongSwan on Android (IKEv2 only)