How to Build Brotli From Source on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Brotli is a new compression method with a better compression ratio than GZIP. Its source code is publicly hosted on this Github repo. This guide will show you the commands you need to run and build Brotli from source code.

Before you begin

Check the Ubuntu version.

lsb_release -ds
# Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Create a new non-root user account with sudo access and switch to it.

adduser johndoe --gecos "John Doe"
usermod -aG sudo johndoe
su - johndoe

NOTE: Replace johndoe with your username.

Set up the timezone.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Ensure that your system is up to date.

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

Clone the Brotli repository.

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

Navigate to the Brotli source directory.

cd brotli

Create a manual page for Brotli commands.

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

Check the manual page.

man brotli

To generate Autotools' configure file, first run the ./bootstrap command.

./bootstrap

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

For help, run the ./configure --help command.

Now, build Brotli.

./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 1.0.5

That's it. You have successfully built Brotli from source code.