How to Build Brotli From Source on Debian 9

Brotli is a new compression method with a better compression ratio than Gzip. Its source code is publicly hosted on Github. This guide will show you the commands you need to run and build Brotli from source code on Debian 9.

Before you begin

Check the Debian version.

lsb_release -ds
# Debian GNU/Linux 9.6 (stretch)

Ensure that your system is up to date.

apt update && apt upgrade -y

Install curl, wget and sudo packages; if they’re not already installed.

apt install -y curl wget sudo

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

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 the version.

brotli --version
# brotli 1.0.7

That’s it. You have successfully built Brotli from source code. You can now compress and decompress your files with Brotli compression format on your server.