12 Dic 11 How to quickly install courier-mta mail server from source on debian (for the impatients)

What it follows is a quick n’ dirty but working list of things to do to correctly install you brand new courier mta mail server from source on a linux debian system (or ubuntu). This is for the impatients that don’t want to read the courier installation manual page (http://www.courier-mta.org/install.html). You can download the last stable courier packages from here: http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php.
You only have to download those three software archive files:

1. Courier
2. Courier authentication library
3. Courier unicode library

You’ll need to be root and have an internet connection to install dependencies debian packages.
First of all you have to enable the EN_US-utf8 locale, or “make check” will fail. You can do it with:

dpkg-reconfigure locales

Ready to install? Ok. This is how I have done:

groupadd courier
useradd -m -g courier courier
groupadd vmail
useradd -g vmail -d /opt/courier -m vmail

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install libldap2-dev
apt-get install ldap-utils
apt-get install slapd
apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
apt-get install libpcre++-dev libpcre3-dev
apt-get install libidn11-dev
apt-get install libgdbm-dev
apt-get install libdb-dev
apt-get install libgamin-dev
apt-get install libssl-dev
apt-get install libgnutls28-dev
apt-get install expect
apt-get install libperl-dev
apt-get install libltdl-dev
apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

tar jxvf courier-unicode-x.x.tar.bz2
cd courier-unicode-x.x

./configure –prefix=/opt/courier/unicode

make
make install

cd ..

tar jxvf courier-authlib-0.xx.0.tar.bz2
cd courier-authlib-0.xx.0

export CFLAGS=”-I/opt/courier/unicode/include”
export LDFLAGS=”-L/opt/courier/unicode/lib”

./configure \
–prefix=/opt/courier/authlib \
–without-authvchkpw \
–without-authpgsql \
–with-mysql-libs=/usr \
–with-mysql-includes=/usr \
–with-mailuser=vmail \
–with-mailgroup=vmail

make
make install

cd ..

tar jxvf courier-0.xx.0.tar.bz2
chown -R courier:courier courier-0..0

su – courier
cd courier-0.xx.0

export COURIERAUTHCONFIG=/opt/courier/authlib/bin/courierauthconfig
export CFLAGS=”-I/opt/courier/authlib/include -I/opt/courier/unicode/include”
export CPPFLAGS=”-I/opt/courier/authlib/include -I/opt/courier/unicode/include”
export LDFLAGS=”-L/opt/courier/authlib/lib -L/opt/courier/unicode/lib”

./configure \
–prefix=/opt/courier –with-locking-method=fcntl –without-explicitsync \
–with-qdircount=20 –with-random=/dev/urandom \
–without-ispell –disable-autorenamesent –enable-mimetypes

make
make check
exit
make install-strip
make install-configure >upgrade.log

/opt/courier/sbin/showmodules
/opt/courier/sbin/makesmtpaccess

OK. If everything gone OK, the installation stuff was terminated.
The configuration stuff is another complex thing that I cannot cover now here… may be another time.
Now, continue to read installation manual from here: http://www.courier-mta.org/install.html#aliases

This procedure was last tested with courier 0.75.0 on debian 8.4, but should be OK with newer versions too.
The software will be installed in /opt/courier.

I hope that it will help someone.
Ciao, Dino.