Install tmux with no root and Internet

No Internet access in 2020?? Well, if you’re working in this industry then you will not suprise about this. There is no way we can access to the Internet from the login server, and also not root at all. However we still can install some of our beloved tools without asking IT team.

What do we need first

You should download these source files below to your local laptop and then copy them to your home dir in the linux server.

libevent and ncurses are two libraries that required for tmux. Your linux env might has these 2 libraries already, but there is high possibility that those libs are too old and incompatible.

Then we install them locally

First create your local directory

   mkdir -p $HOME/local

Secondly install libevent

   tar xvzf libevent-2.0.19-stable.tar.gz
   cd libevent-2.1.12-stable.tar.gz
   ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local --disable-shared
   make
   make install

The --prefix=$HOME/local is commonly used when installing a tool without root. Basically it will guide the compiling step to store any data to the $HOME/local. So remember this for later use.

Then install ncurses

   tar xvzf ncurses-5.9.tar.gz
   cd ncurses-5.9
   ./configure --prefix=$HOME/local
   make
   make install

Finally install tmux

   tar xvzf tmux-3.3a.tar.gz
   cd tmux-3.3a

Create a bash script, then copy this code below to that bash script (not tcsh or csh script), for example compiletmux.sh

#!/bin/bash
 ./configure CFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/include -I$HOME/local/include/ncurses" LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/local/lib -L$HOME/local/include/ncurses -L$HOME/local/include"
 CPPFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/include -I$HOME/local/include/ncurses" LDFLAGS="-static -L$HOME/local/include -L$HOME/local/include/ncurses -L$HOME/local/lib" make

Then run this new script compiletmux.sh, you’ll see a tmux binary file in current directory. Finally, copy this tmux to $HOME/local/bin and enjoy your new life with tmux.