Using libcurl with minimal dependencies

LibCURL logo For an ongoing project I needed to retrieve webpages from my C-program and first I used sockets directly, but then I thought why not try use libcurl? If I could use libcurl and link it statically then I would get the good features from libcurl, but still could make my application stand alone.

With my current setup running Debian (Lenny), I tried to just apt-get the libraries (libcurl4-openssl-dev) and build using those libraries That went fine until I tried to link them statically with my application. After reading different mail archives, forum and tried on my own I got my application to link (static) with libcurl. Basically what I needed to do was.

  • Download libcurl source
  • Compile libcurl myself (disable one define, more about that below).
  • Point to my own built libcurl.a library when building my own application.

So to save some headache for myself next time I want to do it or for someone else reading this I've listed the steps I had to do to get this to work.

Download libcurl source

As of writing this, the latest version of libcurl was 7.21.0 so I downloaded and unpacked the source.

wget http://curl.haxx.se/download/curl-7.21.0.tar.bz2
tar xjvf curl-7.21.0.tar.bz2
{% endcodeblock %}

Compile libcurl

Next it was time to run ./configure and make. Here I basically disabled everything for libcurl except HTTP and FILE.

./configure --prefix=$HOME/devel/libcurl --disable-dict --disable-ftp --disable-imap --disable-ldap --disable-ldaps --disable-pop3 --disable-proxy --disable-rtsp --disable-shared --disable-smtp --disable-telnet --disable-tftp --disable-zlib --without-ca-bundle --without-gnutls --without-libidn --without-librtmp --without-libssh2 --without-nss --without-ssl --without-zlib

Edit the file lib/curl_config.h which is generated during the configure step. In this file we uncomment the line saying

/* Define to 1 if you have the clock_gettime function and monotonic timer. */
//#define HAVE_CLOCK_GETTIME_MONOTONIC 1

If I didn't do this, then I would have a dependency to librt which I didn't want to.

make
make install

Now I was done with libcurl, next I should use this library in my application.

Build the application using libcurl

To make things simple when describing this I instead use the file simple.c which is found on libcurl's site.

In simple_libcurl.tar.gz I've put together the source and a Makefile which builds using the library just created. The magic is the LDFLAGS line used in the linking step on line 12 and 24 below. I.e. on line 12 I had have to point the folder where the library is located that I had built myself (-L/path/to/my/libcurl.a) and I still needed to tell the linker that I wanted to use libcurl, hence the -lcurl parameter.

SRCDIR  := src
OBJDIR  := obj
SRC     := $(patsubst $(SRCDIR)/%.c, %.c, $(wildcard $(SRCDIR)/*.c))
OBJS    := $(addprefix $(OBJDIR)/, $(patsubst %.c, %.o, $(SRC)))

INCDIR  := inc

CC      := gcc
CFLAGS  += $(addprefix -I, $(INCDIR))
CFLAGS  += -I/home/jyx/devel/libcurl/include

LDFLAGS := -L/home/jyx/devel/libcurl/lib -lcurl

.PHONY : all clean

all: main

$(OBJDIR)/%.o: $(SRCDIR)/%.c
    @echo " (CC)    $<"
    @$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $@

main: $(OBJS)
    @echo "Create binary: $@"
    @$(CC) -o main $+ $(LDFLAGS)

clean:
    rm -f $(OBJDIR)/* main

When this is achieved, then you have a quite clean binary when it comes to dependencies. In the example code in simple_libcurl I now have these dependencies on a machine running Debian (Lenny).

$ ldd main
    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007f157db66000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f157d5f9000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f157d94c000)

Have fun with libcurl!

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