Compiling & Installing LevelDB on Linux

Update: Please also take a look at this followup article for an automatic compilation script that builds Ubuntu DEB packages!

Problem:

You want to compile and install LevelDB (including development headers) on your Linux computer. ./configure && make && make install does not work so you don’t know how to do this.

or:

You have successfully compiled LevelDB, but make install doesn’t work (there is no official installation procedure yet) and you don’t know how to install it to your system

Solution:

Compilation: Let’s start from scratch. I recommend using the bleeding-edge version in the git repository, but this method should also work for the downloadable archive

1. Install git and snappy, for example on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install git-core libsnappy-dev
2. Clone LevelDB into a directory of your choice: git clone https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/
3. cd into the directory: cd leveldb
4. make

You don’t neccessarily need snappy as LevelDB will work without it but you would need to recompile if you don’t install it before compiling.

Installation:

Excecute the following shell snippet as root from your LevelDB folder:

#!/bin/sh
cp --preserve=links libleveldb.* /usr/local/lib
cp -r include/leveldb /usr/local/include/
ldconfig

This installs LevelDB to /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/include in order to make it easier to uninstall/update it later.

This procedure might also work under other operating systems like Cygwin/MSYS-based environments, but I didn’t test this. Besides that I assume that LevelDB has been tested by Google on Linux servers only, so don’t assume it’s stable on other OSs without testing.

Update 20 Jan 2013: Added guide how to compile and what dependencies are needed