1. Installation

Spicy can be installed from pre-built binaries (Linux, macOS) or with Homebrew (macOS), executed via Docker containers (Linux), or built from source (Linux, macOS, FreeBSD):

We generally aim to follow Zeek’s platform policy on which platforms to support and test.

Note

If your goal is to use Spicy with Zeek, you can skip these installation instructions. Zeek comes with Spicy support built-in by default since version 5.0. See the Zeek documentation for more.

1.1. Pre-built binaries

1.1.1. Linux

We provide pre-built Spicy binaries for a range of Linux distributions, both for the current release version and for development builds made from the Git main branch.

These binary artifacts are distributed as either DEB or RPM packages for the corresponding distribution; or, in a couple cases, as TAR archives. To install the binaries, download the corresponding package and execute one of the following:

DEB packages
# dpkg --install spicy.deb
RPM packages
# rpm -i spicy.rpm
TAR archives

The TAR archives need to be unpacked into /opt/spicy. Any previous installation must be removed first:

# rm -rf /opt/spicy && mkdir /opt/spicy
# tar xf spicy.tar.gz -C /opt/spicy --strip-components=1

The binaries may require installation of additional dependencies; see the Dockerfile for the respective platform for what’s needed.

Platform

Release Version

Development Version

Dockerfile

Alpine 3.18

TAR

TAR

Dockerfile

CentOS Stream 8

TAR

RPM

Dockerfile

Debian 10

DEB

DEB

Dockerfile

Debian 11

DEB

DEB

Dockerfile

Fedora 37

RPM

RPM

Dockerfile

Fedora 38

RPM

RPM

Dockerfile

Ubuntu 20

DEB

DEB

Dockerfile

Ubuntu 22

DEB

DEB

Dockerfile

1.1.2. macOS

1.1.2.1. Homebrew

We provide a Homebrew formula for installation of Spicy. After installing Homebrew add the Zeek tap:

# brew tap zeek/zeek

To install the most recent Spicy release version, execute:

# brew install spicy

To instead install the current development version, execute:

# brew install --HEAD spicy

1.1.2.2. Pre-built binaries

We provide TAR archives with pre-built binaries for the following macOS versions:

macOS

Release Version

Development Version

Monterey (12)

TAR

Ventura (13)

TAR

The TAR archives need to be unpacked into /opt/spicy. Any previous installation must be removed first. To prevent macOS from quarantining the files, you should download and unpack via the command line:

# curl -L <link-per-above> -o spicy.tar.gz
# rm -rf /opt/spicy && mkdir /opt/spicy
# tar xf spicy.tar.gz -C /opt/spicy --strip-components 1

For JIT support, these binaries require an Xcode installation.

1.2. Using Docker

The Zeek Docker images include Spicy. See their documentation on how to run them.

Note

Docker Desktop for Mac uses a VM behind the scenes to host the Docker runtime environment. By default it allocates 2 GB of RAM to the VM. This is not enough to compile Spicy analzers and will cause an error that looks something like this:

c++: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1plus)
Please submit a full bug report,
with preprocessed source if appropriate.
See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-7/README.Bugs> for instructions.

This is due to the VM hitting an out-of-memory condition. To avoid this you will need to allocate more RAM to the VM. Click on the Docker Icon in your menubar and select “Preferences”. Click on the “Advanced” tab and then use the slider to select 8 GB of RAM. Docker Desktop will restart and then you will be ready to go.

1.3. Building from source

1.3.1. Prerequisites

To build Spicy from source, you will need:

  • For compiling the toolchain:

    • A C++ compiler that supports C++17 (known to work are Clang >= 9 and GCC >= 9)

    • CMake >= 3.15

    • Bison >= 3.0

    • Flex >= 2.6

    • Python >= 3.4

    • Zlib (no particular version)

  • For testing:

    • BTest >= 0.66 (pip install btest)

    • Bash (for BTest)

  • For building the documentation:

In the following we record how to get these dependencies in place on some popular platforms. Please file an issue if you have instructions for platforms not yet listed here.

1.3.1.1. Linux

See the corresponding Dockerfiles.

1.3.1.2. macOS

Make sure you have Xcode installed, including its command-line tools (xcode-select --install).

If you are using Homebrew:

# brew install bison flex cmake ninja python@3.8 sphinx-doc
# pip3 install btest sphinx_rtd_theme

If you are using MacPorts:

# port install flex bison cmake ninja python38 py38-pip py38-sphinx py38-sphinx_rtd_theme
# pip install btest

1.3.1.3. FreeBSD

See the prepare script coming with the Spicy distribution.

1.3.2. Building Spicy

Get the code:

# git clone --recursive https://github.com/zeek/spicy

The short version to build Spicy is the usual process then:

# ./configure && make && make install

However, you may want to customize the build a bit, see the output ./configure --help for the available options. In particular, you can use --prefix=/other/path to install into something else than /usr/local.

The final configure output will summarize your build’s configuration.

Note

For developers, the following configure options may be particular useful:

  • --enable-ccache: use the ccache compiler cache to speed up compilation

  • --enable-debug: compile a non-optimized debug version

  • --enable-sanitizer: enable address & leak sanitizers

  • --generator=Ninja: use the faster ninja build system instead of make

Using Ninja and ccache will speed up compile times. On Linux, compiling will also be quite a bit faster if you have the “Gold linker” available. To check if you do, see if which ld.gold returns anything. If yes, configure will automatically pick it up.

Once you have configured Spicy, running make will change into the newly created build directory and start the compilation there. Once finished, make test will execute the test suite. It will take a bit, but all tests should be passing (unless explicitly reported as expected to fail). Finally, make install will install Spicy system-wide into the configured prefix. If you are installing into a non-standard location, make sure that <prefix>/bin is in your PATH.

Note

You can also use the Spicy tools directly out of the build directory without installing; the binaries land in build/bin.

To build Spicy’s documentation, run make inside the docs/ directory. Documentation will then be located in build/doc/html.

1.4. Parser development setup

In order to speed up compilation of Spicy parsers, users can create a cache of precompiled files. This cache is tied to a specific Spicy version, and needs to be recreated each time Spicy is updated.

To precompile the files execute the following command:

# spicy-precompile-headers

Note

By default the cache is located in the folder .cache/spicy/<VERSION> inside the user’s home directory. This location can be overridden by setting the environment variable SPICY_CACHE to a different folder path, both when executing spicy-precompile-headers and Spicy toolchain commands.