Welcome to serf, a high-performance asynchronous HTTP client library.
The serf library is a C-based HTTP client library built upon the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library. It multiplexes connections, running the read/write communication asynchronously. Memory copies and transformations are kept to a minimum to provide high performance operation.
1.1. SCons build system
serf uses SCons 2.3 for its build system. If it is not installed on your system, then you can install it onto your system. If you do not have permissions, then you can download and install the "local" version into your home directory. When installed privately, simply create a symlink for 'scons' in your PATH to /path/to/scons/scons.py.
Fetch the scons-local package: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scons/scons-local-2.3.0.tar.gz
1.2 Building serf
To build serf:
$ scons APR=/path/to/apr APU=/path/to/apu OPENSSL=/openssl/base PREFIX=/path/to/prefix
The switches are recorded into .saved_config, so they only need to be specified the first time scons is run.
PREFIX should specify where serf should be installed. PREFIX defaults to /usr/local.
The default for the other three switches (APR, APU, OPENSSL) is /usr.
The build system looks for apr-1-config at $APR/bin/apr-1-config, or the path should indicate apr-1-config itself. Similarly for the path to apu-1-config.
OPENSSL should specify the root of the install (eg. /opt/local). The includes will be found OPENSSL/include and libraries at OPENSSL/lib.
If you wish to use VPATH-style builds (where objects are created in a distinct directory from the source), you can use:
$ scons -Y /path/to/serf/source
If you plan to install the library on a system that uses different paths for architecture dependent files, specify LIBDIR. LIBDIR defaults to /usr/local/lib otherwise. Example for a 64 bit GNU/Linux system:
$ scons PREFIX=/usr/ LIBDIR=/usr/lib64
At any point, the current settings can be examined:
$ scons --help
1.3 Running the test suite
$ scons check
1.4 Installing serf
$ scons install
Note that the PREFIX variable should have been specified in a previous invocation of scons (and saved into .saved_config), or it can be specified on the install command line:
$ scons PREFIX=/some/path install
Distribution package maintainers regulary install to a buildroot, and would normally use something like below in their build systems, with placeholders for the specific paths:
$ scons PREFIX=/usr/ LIBDIR=/usr/lib64 $ scons install --install-sandbox=/path/to/buildroot
1.4 Cleaning up the build
$ scons -c