Linux

As tracking down issues which result from missing or outdated third party tools such as compilers are always hard do diagnose, we have extended the build of PLC4X with a prerequisiteCheck that automatically checks if required tools are installed and if a required minimum version is available.

If any of the prerequisites are not met, the build fails with an error message that will help finding out what’s wrong.

The number of checks is highly dependent on which profiles are enabled. So for example, the availability and version of the C compiler is only checked if the with-c profile is enabled.

If the check is reporting any issues, please feel free to follow the corresponding steps in this guide to install the tools.

Git

Checking:

git --version

If you get any successful output, you probably don’t need to do anything.

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install git

Yum-based systems:

sudo yum install git

Java

Checking:

java --version

If you get output successfully indicating at least Java 11, you don’t need to do anything.

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install openjdk-21-jdk

Optional and other language support

Git an Java should be all you need for building the Java part of PLC4X.

LibPCAP (For raw-ethernet support)

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install libpcap-dev

Yum-based systems:

sudo yum install libpcap-devel

Using libpcap usually requires root privileges. However, the java process can be granted permission to do so by executing the following command.

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /path/to/java

/path/to/java however needs to be a real file and not a symlink. So on my Ubuntu 22.04 system, where I installed java as described above, the command is as follows:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw,cap_net_admin=eip /usr/lib/jvm/java-21-openjdk-arm64/bin/java

Sometimes I had to set the uid to execute the java executable with the permissions of the owner (root) …​ However, this is a quite suboptimal solution.

sudo chmod 4755 /path/to/java

gcc (For PLC4C)

Checking:

gcc --version

If you get any successful output, you probably don’t need to do anything.

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install gcc

Yum-based systems:

sudo yum install gcc

dotnet (For PLC4Net)

Checking:

dotnet --version

If you get any successful output, you probably don’t need to do anything.

Microsoft has documented what is needed to install .Net SDK here

For Ubuntu this would be:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
wget https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc -O /etc/apt/keyrings/microsoft.asc
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/microsoft.asc] https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/24.04/prod noble main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft-dotnet.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install dotnet-sdk-8.0

For other distributions, please select the distribution in the drop-down menu and follow the instructions there.

If, when checking the version again after installing, you are getting an error:

A fatal error occurred. The folder [/usr/share/dotnet/host/fxr] does not exist

Then please have a look at this Stackoverflow post (the accepted solution) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73753672/a-fatal-error-occurred-the-folder-usr-share-dotnet-host-fxr-does-not-exist

python (For PLC4Py)

Checking:

python3 --version

If you get a version of 3.7 or higher reported, you probably don’t need to do anything.

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install python3

Yum-based systems:

yum intall python3

Python venv (For PLC4Py)

Checking:

python3 -Im ensurepip

If you are getting anything else than a: No module named ensurepip, you’re ok. It seems that this manually needs to be installed on some systems.

Apt-based systems:

sudo apt install python3-venv