First we download the Zabbix source code which can be obtained from the Zabbix website. When going to download, click on download again; Zabbix stable source is the first on top. Save the file in the /usr/src folder.

Next thing of course, is the extraction of the tar.gz file we have downloaded. This can be done with tar. For example:

# tar -zxvf zabbix-2.4.x.tar.gz

We now have a folder that contains the Zabbix source code. For example: the /usr/src/zabbix-2.4.x folder.

We need to install Apache, MySQL, PHP, and some other libraries for our server. This can be done with:

# yum install httpd php php-mysql php-bcmath php-mbstring php- gd php-xml mysql mysql-server -y

We also need a user and a group for the Zabbix server to run as since we don't want to run our server as root. So we will create a group and a user Zabbix first:

# groupadd zabbix
# useradd -g zabbix zabbix

To be able to start the compilation process, we need to install some extra packages on our system before we can begin, of course:

# yum install gcc mysql-devel libxml2-devel net-snmp-devel curl-devel unixODBC-devel OpenIPMI-devel libssh2-devel iksemel-devel openldap-devel

For some packages you probably have to add the EPEL repository to your setup. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL.

To get a list of all options supported when compiling we have to run next command in the extracted folder:

# ./configure --help

To compile the sources for a Zabbix server, you could run something like the following line. Options depend on your installation:

# ./configure --enable-server --enable-agent --with-mysql -- enable-ipv6 --with-net-snmp --with-libcurl --with-libxml2 -- with-openipmi --with-unixodbc --with-ssh2 --with-ldap --with- jabber

If finished correctly, you will get a message telling you to run 'make install' now. If you get an error, you probably have to install a missing development library. The last line will tell you what is missing:

# make install

The compiler will be running for sometime depending on the speed of your system; just let it run till it stops. It will stop after sometime and when there are no errors at the end, your Zabbix server will be compiled.

You need to configure database connection settings, and so on. just like we did with the installation from the Zabbix server from package. The standard location of the configuration files and the Zabbix server can be found under:

# /usr/local/etc/ → Zabbix configuration files
# /usr/local/sbin/ → Zabbix server

As you probably have noticed, there are no init scripts when you compile from source. This is something you will have to create by yourself. Or you could use the ones provided by Zabbix. Those can be found under the /usr/src/zabbix-2,4,x/misc/init.d file.

Now we also need to install the Zabbix frontend. The most easiest way is to copy the files into a sub directory of the HTML root:

# mkdir /var/www/html/zabbix
# cd /usr/src/zabbix-2.4.x/frontends/php
# cp -a . /var/www/html/zabbix
# chown -R –no-dereference apache:apache /var/www/html/zabbix

Best is to create a zabbix.conf file for Apache in the /etc/httpd/conf.d/ folder:

<Directory "/var/www/html/zabbix">
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

    php_value max_execution_time 300
    php_value memory_limit 128M
    php_value post_max_size 16M
    php_value upload_max_filesize 2M
    php_value max_input_time 300
    php_value date.timezone Europe/Brussels
</Directory>