This is optional and should be done only if you want to build your own RPM. Otherwise, use the RepoForge repository mentioned previously and skip this section.

Icinga's source tarball has the SPEC file for building RPMs. The procedure to build RPMs remains as usual. Create a non-root user account, and log in with that user to build the RPMs. Do not do this as the root user.

Download the Icinga source tarball and extract it. Install RPM Development Tools using the following command:

$ sudo yum install rpmdevtools

You can also install it using the following command:

$ sudo yum install @development-tools fedora-packager

Now, set up the build folder:

$ rpmdev-setuptree
$ ls ~/rpmbuild
BUILD  RPMS  SOURCES  SPECS  SRPMS

Now, copy the SPEC file from the extracted source to SPECS and the source tarball to SOURCES:

$ cp icinga.spec ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
$ cp icinga-*.tar.gz ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES

Build the final RPM packages using the following commands:

$ cd ~/rpmbuild
$ rpmbuild -bb SPECS/icinga.spec

The preceding command might give some dependency errors. Install the listed packages with yum, and run the last rpmbuild command again. If all the dependencies are fixed, the compilation should start, which usually takes some time to complete. The RPM package will be created inside the RPMS/$arch folder, where $arch is the server's architecture (i386/x86_64).

$ ls ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64
icinga-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-idoutils-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-devel-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-idoutils-libdbi-mysql-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-doc-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-idoutils-libdbi-pgsql-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
icinga-gui-1.9.1-1.el6.x86_64.rpm

The icinga package is the Icinga Core; icinga-doc provides the Icinga offline documentation; icinga-gui provides the Icinga web interface; and icinga-idoutils-* provides an optional component to store Icinga information in a database. Now, install the icinga, icinga-doc, and icinga-gui built RPMs:

$ cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/
$ sudo rpm –ivh {icinga,icinga-doc,icinga-gui}-*.rpm

The installation should succeed. Now install the Apache and Nagios plugins. The nagios-plugins package provides checking of all the basic check plugins that are commonly used for monitoring:

$ sudo yum install httpd nagios-plugins

Also, install SMTP relay server (Postfix is used in the next example) and use the mail command for sending e-mail alerts:

$ sudo yum install postfix mailx

Debian packages for Ubuntu are available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/icinga, which can be used to install Icinga on an Ubuntu Server.

$ sudo apt-get install icinga icinga-doc

This command should install the Icinga package which is ready for use. Install the Apache and Nagios plugins:

$ sudo apt-get install apache2 nagios-plugins

Also use the postfix and mail commands:

$ sudo apt-get install postfix bsd-mailx

This setup is good enough for now. Let's continue with the next section.

Let us see how to compile Icinga from the source using the following steps:

Icinga is now installed and (almost) ready for use.

We need to create a user named icinga because the Icinga server will run as this user:

$ useradd –m icinga
$ passwd icinga

Since the web server will be run as the apache user (in most cases, this is by default, and is not changed unless required by other applications using Apache), we need to add this user to the icinga group.

$ usermod –a icinga apache

The default web server user may be different for different distributions (for example, www, and so on).