Installing latest libcurl on debian from source

Question

So I need libcurl (dev) on my debian 8 machine. I have two issues with this:

A) apt-get install libcurl-dev gives me an error:

E: Package 'libcurl-dev' has no installation candidate

B) It's pretty outdated.

It seems sensible to build from source but I have two questions:

1) Which version do I need from this page since I am using debian 7, I can;t seem to understand how to find the package URL: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=curl

2) What is the common location for me to build it? What directory should I compile it?

Solution

apt-get install libcurl-dev gives me an error: E: Package 'libcurl-dev' has no installation candidate

What do you really need? It looks like the packages were renamed. And you get different dev packages based on which tls library you want. See the following link for all the packages built against the curl source.

• https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/curl

B) It's pretty outdated.

The jessie package is 7.38 upstream is 7.42.1, the version in jessie does seem to have most of the patches backported that were applied between 7.38 and 7.42.

• https://sources.debian.net/src/curl/7.38.0-4%2Bdeb8u1/debian/patches/

Comments

[Alen Milakovic]

You could use either libcurl4-gnutls-dev or libcurl4-nss-dev, corresponding to two different flavors of libcurl. These replace libcurl-dev. It looks like libcurl-dev has not been in Debian for awhile.

[Paul Smith]

Thank you for the reply. So the standard version has the patches or I need to add something to my sources.list in order to get that version?

[dribler]

I pointed you at the version 7.38.0-4+deb8u1 with those patches, I believe it should have any security related patches. Since you said you were using Jessie, this means you need the main repo enabled and the security repo enabled. This would have happened by default unless you were running the 'expert' mode where you could have customized that.