Installing Barnyard is a fairly straightforward process for those users familiar with downloading and compiling source packages. Unfortunately, Barnyard is not currently available in any of the major UNIX distributions and we are unaware of any prebuilt packages that can be easily installed. Therefore, to use Barnyard, you are going to have to compile it. The requirements for building Barnyard are similar to those for building Snort. If you have successfully built Snort on your system, then building Barnyard should be no problem. However, if you installed Snort from a package, you may need to install additional software in order to build Barnyard.

To build Barnyard, you must have a C compiler installed on your system. Barnyard has been developed and tested using gcc, but should also compile with other C compilers. If you want to include database support for Barnyard, then you will also need to install the appropriate headers and libraries for the database you want to use. For example, on Debian Linux, to build Barnyard with MySQL support you will need the package libmysqlclient-dev installed.

Barnyard is developed and tested using Debian Linux; however, it should also run on any of the UNIX systems on which Snort runs. While Barnyard is not officially supported on Windows systems, unofficial packages are available at www.codecraftconsultants.com/Barnyard.aspx.