There is a great deal of documentation available for building Gerbera from source on a variety of Linux flavors. Unfortunately, Fedora isn’t one of those (and the package names don’t exactly match up to let you replace “apt-get” with “yum” and be done). So I am quickly documenting the process we followed to build Gerbera from source.

The Fedora build of Gerbera has the binaries in /usr/bin and the manual build places the gerbera binary in /usr/local/bin — the build updates the unit file to reflect this change, but this means you want to back up any customizations you’ve made to the unit file before running “make install”.

You need the build system — cmake, g++, etc and the devel packages from the following table as required by your build options

Additional packages that we needed to install: automake, autoconf, libtool

Library	Fedora Package	Required?	Note	Compile-time option	Default
libpupnp	libupnp-devel	XOR libnpupnp	pupnp
libnpupnp	Build from source (if needed)	XOR libupnp	I was only able to locate this as a source, not available from Fedora repos	WITH_NPUPNP	Disabled
libuuid	libuuid-devel	Required	Not required on *BSD
pugixml	pugixml-devel	Required	XML file and data support
libiconv	glibc-headers	Required	Charset conversion
sqlite3	sqlite-devel	Required	Database storage
zlib	zlib-devel	Required	Data compression
fmtlib	fmt-devel	Required	Fast string formatting
spdlog	spdlog-devel	Required	Runtime logging
duktape	duktape-devel	Optional	Scripting Support	WITH_JS	Enabled
mysql	mariadb-devel	Optional	Alternate database storage	WITH_MYSQL	Disabled
curl	libcurl-devel	Optional	Enables web services	WITH_CURL	Enabled
taglib	taglib-devel	Optional	Audio tag support	WITH_TAGLIB	Enabled
libmagic	file-devel	Optional	File type detection	WITH_MAGIC	Enabled
libmatroska	libmatroska-devel	Optional	MKV metadata required for MKV	WITH_MATROSKA	Enabled
libebml	libebml-devel	Optional	MKV metadata required for MKV	WITH_MATROSKA	Enabled
ffmpeg/libav	ffmpeg-free-devel	Optional	File metadata	WITH_AVCODEC	Disabled
libexif	libexif-devel	Optional	JPEG Exif metadata	WITH_EXIF	Enabled
libexiv2	exiv2-devel	Optional	Exif, IPTC, XMP metadata	WITH_EXIV2	Disabled
lastfmlib	liblastfm-devel	Optional	Enables scrobbling	WITH_LASTFM	Disabled
ffmpegthumbnailer	ffmpegthumbnailer-devel	Optional	Generate video thumbnails	WITH_FFMPEGTHUMBNAILER	Disabled
inotify	glibc-headers	Optional	Efficient file monitoring	WITH_INOTIFY
libavformat	libavformat-free-devel	Required for 2.0
libavutil	libavutil-free-devel	Required for 2.0
libavcodec	libavcodec-free-devel	Required for 2.0

Then follow the generalized instructions — cd into the folder where you want to run the build and run (customizing the cmake line as you wish):

git clone https://github.com/gerbera/gerbera.git
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../gerbera -DWITH_MAGIC=1 -DWITH_MYSQL=1 -DWITH_CURL=1 -DWITH_INOTIFY=1 -DWITH_JS=1 -DWITH_TAGLIB=1 -DWITH_AVCODEC=1 -DWITH_FFMPEGTHUMBNAILER=0 -DWITH_EXIF=1 -DWITH_EXIV2=1 -DWITH_SYSTEMD=1 -DWITH_LASTFM=0 -DWITH_DEBUG=1
make -j4
sudo make install

As with the Gerbera binary, the Fedora build places the web content in /usr/share/gerbera and the manual build places the web content into /usr/local/share/gerbera — yes, you can change the paths in the build, and I’m sure you can clue Gerbera into the new web file location. I opted for the quick/easy/lazy solution of running

mv /usr/share/gerbera /usr/share/gerbera/old
ln -s /usr/local/share/gerbera /usr/share/

To symlink the location my config thinks the web components should be located to the new files.

On the first start of Gerbera, SQL scripts may be run to update the database — don’t stop or kill the service during this process there’s no checkpoint restart of the upgrade process. We backed up /etc/gerbera/gerbera.db prior to starting our Gerbera installation. We’ve also wiped the database files to start from scratch and test changes that impacted how items are ingested into the database.

Fin.