install.md

[[!meta title="Install"]]

From source, on a single host

Fetch the latest release in your preferred archive format.

Life with qmail continues to apply. Note that some modern systems -- we've seen at least OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Void Linux -- don't provide nroff. mandoc or GNU troff (aka groff) should do the trick. Please also review our notes about [[patches]].

From source, to many hosts

notqmail makes it easy to build once, install many.

On the build host

Customize conf-users and conf-groups, if needed, and note the names. Then build, stage, and create a tarball:

$ make it man
$ export DESTDIR=/path/to/staging/directory
$ make package
$ tar -C ${DESTDIR} -czf notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz .

On an install host

Copy over notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz, instchown, and instcheck from the build host. Extract the tarball -- e.g., with GNU Tar:

# tar -C / --no-overwrite-dir -xzf notqmail-bin-VERSION.tar.gz

Create users and groups with names to match the build. Set permissions on installed files:

# ./instchown

Then verify the installation, just as with a traditional qmail install:

# ./instcheck

From vendor packages

Binary packages for many RPM and DEB based distributions are provided through OpenBuildService.

pkgsrc

$ cd mail/qmail && make install

or on platforms with recent binary packages available,

# pkg_add qmail