The long-awaited Firebird 4 release is drawing closer, so I thought it would be a nice idea to check it out and verify that it works with firebird_fdw (and possibly add support for new features). As part of that I thought I'd try and build Firebird from source, something I've never done before. The aim is to be able to build and start an ad-hoc instance running under my local system user on a custom port, to prevent any kind ofconflict with the existing Firebird 3.x installation, installed from standard packages.

With PostgreSQL this is fairly straightforward:

./configure --prefix=/home/wherever/builds/postgresql-13
make -s -j 4 && make install

then execute initdb, modify the configuration to use a non-default port and and start it up with pg_ctl.

With Firebird the process is somewhat less straightforward. The basic source installation process is documented here:

• Building the code on POSIX

but this assumes an install on a system where another Firebird version is not already installed and running.

In particular, the normal "./configure && make install" process will end up launching an interactive install script, which refuses to run if it detects a running Firebird instance, and requires root permission to perform the install.

After some false starts and some assistance from the firebird-devel list I was able to get a purely local install running, with the following steps:

1. Obtain the source

git clone https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird.git

2. Run autogen.sh

This only needs to be run once in a newly checked-out repository:

$ ./autogen.sh
AUTORECONF=autoreconf
**Warning**: I am going to run `configure' with no arguments.
If you wish to pass any to it, please specify them on the
`./autogen.sh' command line.

Running autoreconf ...
autoreconf: Entering directory `.'
...
(many lines of output snipped)

The Firebird4 package has been configured with the following options:

                    Raw devices : enabled
                   Service name : gds_db
                   Service port : 3050
                   GPRE modules : c_cxx.cpp

                    Install Dir : /usr/local/firebird

Now type `make' to compile Firebird4

It helpfully (!) runs configure with the default settings, which we of course don't want.

3. Run configure with custom settings

./configure \
    --prefix=/opt/firebird4 \
    --oldincludedir=/opt/firebird4/include \
    --with-system-editline \
    --with-service-port=3051 \
    --enable-binreloc

"--enable-binreloc" seems to be required to enable the Firebird binaries to function outside of the expected installation location. It does appear to be enabled by default though.

"--with-system-editline" is recommended to provide superior editing capability in isql.

Note that if building on CentOS 7, you may need to add the following items:

    --with-builtin-tommath
    --with-builtin-tomcrypt

as the system-installed packages (at least the ones on my machine) might not be up-to-date enough.

4. Build the code

Just plain "make". This will create the installation files in the subdirectory "gen/Release/firebird/".

5. Ensure the local system user is a member of the "firebird" group

If there's an existing Firebird installation, it will have created the "/tmp/firebird" directory as:

    drwxrwx--- 2 firebird firebird 4096 Aug 28 15:38 /tmp/firebird/

and a Firebird instance running under a different user will need to be able to write to this.

It's not clear if individual instances can use a different directory.

6. Create the SYSDBA user

    cd gen/Release/firebird/
    ./bin/isql examples/empbuild/employee.fdb
    SQL> CREATE USER sysdba PASSWORD 'masterkey';

If using the built-in "libtom*" packages, it will probably be necessary to explicitly set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include gen/Release/firebird/lib/ before executing any Firebird binaries.

7. Update the configuration files

Sample configuration files are located in gen/Release/firebird/. These will be read when manually starting Firebird from the installation files directory.

Despite having specified "--with-service-port" in configure, the port setting will not have been modified in the sample firebird.conf file, so it will need to be updated:

RemoteServicePort = 3051

It also seems desirable to set:

WireCrypt = Enabled 

8. Start Firebird manually

$ ./bin/firebird &
[1] 7783

and connect:

$ ./bin/isql localhost/3051:employee -u sysdba -p masterkey
Database: localhost/3051:employee, User: SYSDBA
SQL> SELECT CAST(rdb$get_context('SYSTEM', 'ENGINE_VERSION') AS VARCHAR(10)) FROM rdb$database;

CAST       
========== 
4.0.0 

Obviously this isn't the right way to go around setting up a production machine, and the process could probably be improved upon, but for ad-hoc testing it seems fine.