Squid Web Cache wiki

Squid Web Cache documentation

🔗 Squid on Windows

🔗 Does Squid run on Windows ?

Squid can compile and run on Windows as a system service using the Cygwin emulation environment, or can be compiled in Windows native mode using the MinGW + MSYS development environment. All modern Windows versions are supported

The original development code name of the 2.5 project port was SquidNT, but after the 2.6.STABLE4 release, this project was complete. So when speaking about Squid on Windows, people should always refer to Squid, instead to the old SquidNT name.

🔗 Known Limitations

🔗 Unavailable features

DISKD: still needs to be ported
Transparent Proxy: missing Windows non commercial interception driver
WCCP: these features have not been ported. Without transparent proxy support there is no need or use.
SMP support: Windows equivalent of UDS sockets has not been implemented
Some code sections can make blocking calls.
Some external helpers may not work.
File Descriptors number hard-limited to 2048 when building with MinGW.

🔗 Pre-Built Binary Packages

Packages available for Squid on multiple environments.

🔗 Squid-4

Maintainer: Rafael Akchurin, Diladele B.V.

Bug Reporting: (about the installer only) https://github.com/diladele/squid-windows/issues

MSI installer packages for Windows are at:

64-bit: http://squid.diladele.com/

🔗 Squid-3.3

Bug Reporting: see https://cygwin.com/problems.html

Binary packages for the Cygwin environment on Windows are at:

32-bit: https://cygwin.com/packages/x86/squid/
64-bit: https://cygwin.com/packages/x86_64/squid/

🔗 Installing Squid

🔗 Installing with Cygwin

The usage of the Cygwin environment is very similar to other Unix/Linux environments, and -devel version of libraries must be installed.

Squid will by default, install into /usr/local/squid. If you wish to install somewhere else, see the –prefix option for configure when building

Now, add a new Cygwin user (see the Cygwin user guide) and map it to SYSTEM, or create a new NT user, and a matching Cygwin user and they become the squid runas users.

Read the squid FAQ on permissions if you are using CYGWIN=ntsec.

Now, configure cygrunsrv to run Squid as a service as the chosen username. You may need to check permissions here.

🔗 Service

Command line options for the Windows service support:

-n switch to specify the Windows Service Name. Multiple Squid service instances are allowed. Squid is the default when the switch is not used. All service control operations use this switch to identify the destination instance being targeted.
-i switch to install the Windows service. It’s possible to use -f switch at the same time to specify a different squid.conf file for the Squid Service that will be stored on the Windows Registry. To install the service, the syntax is:
```
  squid -i [-f file] [-n service-name]
```
-r switch will uninstall the Windows service. Use the appropriate -n switch to determine which service instance is being removed. To uninstall the service, the syntax is:
```
  squid -r [-n service-name]
```
-k switch is not new, but requires the use of -n to target the service instance. The syntax is:
```
  squid -k command [-f file] [-n service-name]
```

🔗 Command Line

To use the Squid original command line, the new -O switch must be used ONCE, the syntax is:

squid -O cmdline [-n service-name]

If multiple service command line options must be specified, use quote. The -n switch is needed only when a non default service name is in use.

Do not use the “Start parameters” in the Windows 2000/XP/2003 Service applet. They are specific to Windows services functionality and Squid is not able to interpret and use them.

In the following example the command line of the “squidsvc” Squid service is set to “-D -u 3130”:

squid -O "-u 3130" -n squidsvc

🔗 Cache Manager CGI on Windows

On Windows, cache manager can be used with Microsoft IIS or Apache. Some specific configuration could be needed:

IIS 6 (Windows 2003):
- On IIS 6.0 all CGI extensions are denied by default for security, so the following configuration is needed: - Create a cgi-bin Directory - Define the cgi-bin IIS Virtual Directory with read and CGI execute IIS permissions, ASP scripts are not needed. This automatically defines a cgi-bin IIS web application - Copy cachemgr.cgi into cgi-bin directory and look to file permissions: the IIS system account and SYSTEM must be able to read and execute the file - In IIS manager go to Web Service extensions and add a new Web Service Extension called “Squid Cachemgr”, add the cachemgr.cgi file and set the extension status to Allowed

Apache: On Windows, cachemgr.cgi needs to create a temporary file, so Apache must be instructed to pass the TMP and TEMP Windows environment variables to CGI applications:

  ScriptAlias /squid/cgi-bin/ "c:/squid/libexec/"
  <Location /squid/cgi-bin/cachemgr.cgi>
      PassEnv TMP TEMP
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from workstation.example.com
  </Location>

🔗 Configuration Guides

Windows Update
Active Directory Authentication
Kerberos Authentication
NTLM Authentication These and many other general manuals in the ConfigExamples section.

🔗 Registry DNS lookup

On Windows platforms, if no value is specified in the dns_nameservers option in squid.conf or in the /etc/resolv.conf file, the list of DNS name servers are taken from the Windows registry, both static and dynamic DHCP configurations are supported.

🔗 Compatibility Notes

It’s recommended to use ‘/’ char in Squid paths instead of ‘\’
Paths with spaces (like ‘C:\Programs Files\Squid) are NOT supported by Squid
When using ACL like ‘acl aclname acltype “file”’ the file must be in DOS text format (CR+LF) and the full Windows path must be specified, for example:
```
  acl blocklist dstdomain "c:/squid/etc/blocked1.txt"
```
The Windows equivalent of ‘/dev/null’ is ‘NUL’
Squid doesn’t know how to run external helpers based on scripts, like .bat, .cmd, .vbs, .pl, etc. So in squid.conf the interpreter path must be always specified, for example:
```
  url_rewrite_program c:/perl/bin/perl.exe c:/squid/libexec/redir.pl
  url_rewrite_program c:/winnt/system32/cmd.exe /C c:/squid/libexec/redir.cmd
```
When Squid runs in command line mode, the launching user account must have administrative privilege on the system
“Start parameters” in the Windows 2000/XP/2003 Service applet cannot be used
On Windows Vista and later, User Account Control (UAC) must be disabled before running service installation

🔗 Compiling

configure options

–enable-win32-service
–enable-default-hostsfile

Unsupported configure options:

–with-large-files: No suitable build environment is available on both Cygwin and MinGW, but –enable-large-files works fine

🔗 Compiling with Cygwin

In order to compile Squid, you need to have Cygwin fully installed.

The usage of the Cygwin environment is very similar to other Unix/Linux environments, and -devel version of libraries must be installed.

🔗 Compiling with MinGW

Requires the latest packages from https://osdn.net/projects/mingw/ with GCC 8 or later compiler.

This section needs re-writing. This environment has not successfuly built since Squid-3.4.

In order to compile squid using the MinGW environment, the packages MSYS, MinGW and msysDTK must be installed. Some additional libraries and tools must be downloaded separately:

OpenSSL: Shining Light Productions Win32 OpenSSL
libcrypt: MinGW packages repository
db-1.85: TinyCOBOL download area

3.2+ releases require a newer 4.6 or later version of libdb

Before building Squid with SSL support, some operations are needed (in the following example OpenSSL is installed in C:\OpenSSL and MinGW in C:\MinGW):

Copy C:\OpenSSL\lib\MinGW content to C:\MinGW\lib
Copy C:\OpenSSL\include\openssl content to C:\MinGW\include\openssl
Rename C:\MinGW\lib\ssleay32.a to C:\MinGW\lib\libssleay32.a

Unpack the source archive as usual and run:

    ./configure \
        --enable-build-info="Windows (MinGW32)" \
        --prefix=c:/squid \
        --enable-default-hostsfile=none

    make check && make install

Squid will install into c:\squid. If you wish to install somewhere else, change the –prefix option for configure.

Now, to run Squid as a Windows system service, run squid -n, this will create a service named “Squid” with automatic startup. To start it run net start squid from command line prompt or use the Services Administrative Applet.

Always check the provided release notes for any version specific detail.

🔗 Compiling with msys2

to be completed

🔗 Porting efforts

Squid series 3+ have major build issues on all Windows compiler systems. Below is a summary of the known status for producing a useful Squid for Windows. In a rough order of completeness as of the last page update.

The TODO list for Windows has additional wishlist items that also need to be sorted out:

Separate Windows AIOPS logics from Unix AIO logics. The two are currently mashed together where they should be in separate conditionally built library modules.
Windows OIO support. Alternative to Unix AIO and AIOPS disk I/O functionality.
Building an installer

Issues:

missing shared socket support available in Vista and later. Necessary for SMP workers.
The main Squid binary still lacks SMP support and will only operate with the -N command line option.

🔗 Cygwin

Cygwin has working Squid-4 builds and available packages sponsored by Diladele.

🔗 MinGW-w64

Currently the spare-time focus of porting efforts by the Squid developer team. Latest cross-compilation results at https://build.squid-cache.org/job/trunk-mingw-cross/. As this is spare-time work progress is slow.

cross-compiling:

    # Debian Packages Required:
    #
    # g++
    #       provides GCC base compiler. GCC 8 or later required.
    #
    # mingw-w64
    #       provides GCC cross-compiler. GCC 8 or later required.
    #
    # mingw-w64-tools
    #       provides pkg-config and other build-time tools used by autoconf
    #

    ./configure \
            --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32 \
            BUILDCXX="g++" \
            BUILDCXXFLAGS="-DFOO" \
            --enable-build-info="Windows (MinGW-w64 cross-build)"

Native build:

No work on this environment has been done since Squid-3.3:

Requires the latest packages from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ with GCC 8 or later compiler.

    sh ./configure \
        --enable-build-info="Windows (MinGW-w64)"

🔗 MinGW32

Almost no work on this environment has been done since Squid-3.5:

There also appears to be some work done by Joe Pelaez Jorge (https://code.launchpad.net/~joelpelaez/squid/win32).

🔗 Visual Studio

Almost no work on this environment has been done since Squid-2.7.

Entirely new .sln, .sdf and .vcxproj build files need to be generated. Ideally these would mirror the on-Windows style of convenience libraries assembled to produce a number of different binaries. Experiments along those lines have some nice results.

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