I was struggling a couple of hours to upgrade HAproxy package to its latest version on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server 7.6 and as I could not find a well documented page, I decided to create this article in order to explain the procedure.
The latest version that is available and supported from Red Hat for a Red Hat licensed server is 1.5.8. However we can upgrade the version by compiling the source code that is distributed online from the official page. HAproxy package is open source and its code is distributed so it can be built with make.
For the people that do not know HAproxy, it is a very widely known high performance tcp/http load balancer for Linux/Unix operating systems. More information can be also found on its page.
First things first haproxy-2.1.3.tar.gz must be downloaded and uploaded to the server.
In order to compile successfully and do not face hundred of errors during make you have to be sure that the below libraries are installed on your server. If a package from the below is missing you will get make errors.
- gcc and all its dependencies
- openssl and all its dependencies
- systemd-devel
- readline-devel
LUA is needed in order to make the package. Although LUA 5.1 was installed on the red hat server, during the compilation the variable could not be found so I had to manually install LUA latest version and also use its downloaded directory for the compilation of HAproxy.
Install LUA using the following commands. LUA directory may be needed
curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.4.tar.gz
tar -zxf /root/lua-5.3.4.tar.gz
cd lua-5.3.4
make linux test
sudo make installFinally make source code of HAproxy 2.1.3
make -j $(nproc) TARGET=linux-glibc USE_OPENSSL=1 USE_ZLIB=1 USE_LUA=1 USE_PCRE=1 USE_SYSTEMD=1 LUA_LIB=/root/lua-5.3.5/src/ LUA_INC=/root/lua-5.3.5/src/
sudo make installNormally you should not get any error with the above commands. If so, then the version should be the upgraded. As a last step, reboot the server and then you will get the updated version.
