Prerequisites

Note

Please follow the guide step by step. Later steps might require settings or output of a previous command.

The command sudo is used for executing commands that require privileged access on the system.

Creating a User and a Group

The services provided by the Greenbone Community Edition should run as a dedicated user and group. Therefore a gvm user and a group with the same name will be created.

Debian/UbuntuFedora/CentOS

Creating a gvm system user and group

sudo useradd -r -M -U -G sudo -s /usr/sbin/nologin gvm

Adjusting the Current User

To allow the current user to run gvmd he must be added to the gvm group. To make the group change effective either logout and login again or use su.

Add current user to gvm group

sudo usermod -aG gvm $USER

su $USER

Choosing an Install Prefix

Before building the software stack, a (root) directory must be chosen where the built software will finally be installed. For example, when building packages, the distribution developers set this path to /usr.

By default, it is /usr/local which is also used in this guide. This directory will be stored in an environment variable INSTALL_PREFIX to be able to reference it later.

Setting an install prefix environment variable

export INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local

Setting the PATH

On Debian systems the locations /sbin, /usr/sbin and /usr/local/sbin are not in the PATH of normal users. To run gvmd which is located in /usr/local/sbin the PATH environment variable should be adjusted.

Adjusting PATH for running gvmd

export PATH=$PATH:$INSTALL_PREFIX/sbin

Creating a Source, Build and Install Directory

To separate the sources and the build artifacts, a source and a build directory must be created.

This source directory will be used later in this guide via an environment variable SOURCE_DIR. Accordingly, a variable BUILD_DIR will be set for the build directory. Both can be set to any directory to which the current user has write permissions. Therefore directories in the current user’s home directory are chosen in this guide.

Choosing a source directory

export SOURCE_DIR=$HOME/source
mkdir -p $SOURCE_DIR

Choosing a build directory

export BUILD_DIR=$HOME/build
mkdir -p $BUILD_DIR

Additionally, an install directory will be set as an environment variable INSTALL_DIR. It is used as a temporary installation directory before moving all built artifacts to the final destination.

Choosing a temporary install directory

export INSTALL_DIR=$HOME/install
mkdir -p $INSTALL_DIR

Choosing the Installation Source

For building the GVM software stack, three different sources can be chosen depending on the desired stability:

• Building from release tarballs

• Building from git tags

• Building from release branches

Linux distributions use the release tarballs because it is the most common and well known method to share source code.

Newer build systems may stick with the git tags.

If you are a developer and very familiar with building from source already, you may also try out using the git release branches. These have the advantage that they contain the newest fixes which may not yet be included in the release tarballs or git tags. As a downside, the release branches may contain only partially fixed issues and need to be updated more often.

This guide will use the tarballs to build the software.

Installing Common Build Dependencies

For downloading, configuring, building and installing the Greenbone Community Edition components, several tools and applications are required. To install this requirements the following commands can be used:

Debian/UbuntuFedoraCentOS

Installing common build dependencies

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends --assume-yes \
  build-essential \
  curl \
  cmake \
  pkg-config \
  python3 \
  python3-pip \
  gnupg

Importing the Greenbone Signing Key

To validate the integrity of the downloaded source files, GnuPG is used. It requires downloading the Greenbone Community Signing public key and importing it into the current user’s keychain.

Importing the Greenbone Community Signing key

curl -f -L https://www.greenbone.net/GBCommunitySigningKey.asc -o /tmp/GBCommunitySigningKey.asc
gpg --import /tmp/GBCommunitySigningKey.asc

For understanding the validation output of the gpg tool, it is best to mark the Greenbone Community Signing key as fully trusted.

Setting the trust level for the Greenbone Community Signing key

echo "8AE4BE429B60A59B311C2E739823FAA60ED1E580:6:" | gpg --import-ownertrust