Cannot compile latest 3.0.10 on macOS Sonoma (M1)

[zangobot]

Describe the bug

Following the documentation on the installation wiki, it is not possible to build ModSecurity.

To Reproduce
PCRE is installed, by configures gives this error:
configure: *** pcre library not found.

By symlinking the version I have installed with brew install pcre (ln -s $(brew list pcre | grep 'pcre\.h$') others/pcre.h) I get:

./configure: line 18091: syntax error near unexpected token `ON'
./configure: line 18091: `DX_HTML_FEATURE(ON)'

Which are related to doxygen.
By removing those (since I do not need to build the documentation, I get:

./configure: line 18103: syntax error near unexpected token `sgcheck,'
./configure: line 18103: `AX_VALGRIND_DFLT(sgcheck, off)'

After removing ValGrind, I can execute make but I stumble across this:

Makefile:3339: *** missing separator.  Stop.

by removing the ValGrind check, I got this:

../src/operators/validate_dtd.h:39:31: error: unknown type name 'xmlDtdPtr'
    explicit XmlDtdPtrManager(xmlDtdPtr dtd)
                              ^
../src/operators/validate_dtd.h:49:5: error: unknown type name 'xmlDtdPtr'
    xmlDtdPtr get() const {return m_dtd;}
    ^
../src/operators/validate_dtd.h:51:5: error: unknown type name 'xmlDtdPtr'
    xmlDtdPtr m_dtd; // The resource being managed

that I was not able to patch.

Expected behavior

Compilation and installation of ModSecurity.

Server:

• ModSecurity 3.0.10
• OS: macOS Sonoma 14.0

[martinhsv]

Hello @zangobot ,

For the final issue you report (re: validate_dtd), I suspect that you are building without libxml2 -- either intentionally (by specifying --without-libxml during the configuration step, or simply because you do not have it installed.

The problem with that configuration is related to a recent commit ( #3008 ).

I will make a change to the code to resolve this. In the immediate term the resolution is likely simply to build with libxml2 (you may need to brew install libxml2 for that).

[zangobot]

Hello,

libxml2 is already installed in my system with brew, but it is not detected while installing ModSecurity.

[martinhsv]

I have corrected ( via #3014 ) the specific problem that I described previously.

For your remaining problems: do you experience all of the same ones if you use the tagged version of 3.0.10 rather than current v3/master?

ModSecurity v3 builds successfully (and without special action) on github workflow runners against all of macOS 11, 12, and 13. It's possible that there are nuances in either macOS 14 itself or in the default packages that are supplied.

For issues like pcre or libxml2 being installed but not automatically detected by ModSecurity, you may be able to deal with these by specifying the path with configuration flags like --with-pcre= and --with-libxml=

Similarly, there are configuration flags like --disable-doxygen-doc that may be of use to you. Try ./configure --help for a list of options.

[zangobot]

Ok thank you, I'm looking into this now.
Where I have to set these?
Inside the configure.ac, or as flags for make?

[martinhsv]

Those are command line options to configure.

E.g. On the command line when you would normally run ./configure, run ./configure --disable-doxygen-doc (or whatever)

[zangobot]

Ok, I had to specify libxml2, pcre2, and yajl pointing to my brew installations while calling the configuration.
It compiles now, thank you!