1 Introduction
This guide is will walk you through installing Snort3 Alpha on Ubuntu 14 and 16. These instructions will
Not work on Ubuntu 12 (although an old guide can be found on my website).
Please Note that Snort3 is alpha software. It does contain bugs, and new releases can have different pre-
requisites than when this guide was released. This guide has been written and tested against Snort 3.0.0-a4
build 241, released on December 15, 2017. You may be able to follow this guide to install later releases of
Snort, but the requirements may change.
Since Snort++ is alpha software, you should not use it in production systems. This software has been
released by the Snort team to solicit feedback and for users to test.
This guide will not discuss how to configure Snort as an NIPS or NIDS, how to install additional supporting
software (barnyard2, PulledPork, GUIs), how to setup network interfaces to capture data, Snort sensor
design considerations, descriptions of specific preprocessors, or detailed OpenAppID use. You can read other
articles I have written about these items, as well as how to configure Snort as a full NIDS or NIPS system
on my website: SublimeRobots.com.
Feedback on this guide is encouraged: Noah@SublimeRobots.com.
You can also ask for help on the Snort distribution lists:
Snort Users
Snort Developers
Snort OpenAppID
2 Begin
First, ensure the system is up to date and has the latest list of packages:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
Install the Snort3 prerequisites. Details of these packages can be found in the requirements section of the
Snort3 Manual:
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential autotools-dev libdumbnet-dev libluajit-5.1-dev libpcap-dev \
libpcre3-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config libhwloc-dev cmake
Next install the optional (but highly recommended software):
sudo apt-get install -y liblzma-dev openssl libssl-dev cpputest libsqlite3-dev uuid-dev
If you want to build the latest documentation from the source tree including Snort++ Developers Guide,
install the following (purely optional) packages. These packages are nearly 800 MB in size:
sudo apt-get install -y asciidoc dblatex source-highlight w3m
Since we will install Snort from the github repository, we need a few tools:
sudo apt-get install -y libtool git autoconf
The Snort DAQ (Data Acquisition library)has a few pre-requisites that need to be installed:
sudo apt-get install -y bison flex
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