Overview

What is CustomBuild?

CustomBuild is a tool that manages DirectAdmin-related services and additional software components. Such as web server, email services, SQL, PHP, and others. Most of the packages are compiled from the source. The build process takes some time, but it provides some additional benefits:

• It is easy to customize how software components are compiled and configured.
• New software versions/releases can be used almost immediately after release.
• It is easy to switch between different software versions.

Compiled services will have a lower memory footprint as a result of building them with the desired options only.

CustomBuild is extremely powerful and highly customizable.

Getting started

CustomBuild has a graphical user interface in DirectAdmin, though you may use the command-line tool if you prefer. The CustomBuild CLI interface is available with the da build command. The configuration of CustomBuild is stored in the /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/options.conf file. This section has some commonly used commands.

A list of CustomBuild installed software on the server:

da build versions

General help on ./build commands:

da build help

List of CustomBuild configuration options:

da build opt_help

List of CustomBuild configuration options with extended descriptions:

da build opt_help full

Recompile Apache and PHP:

da build apache
da build php

Rewrite web server configuration files:

da build rewrite_confs

CustomBuild settings

All CustomBuild configuration is stored in a single file /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/options.conf. The file has a simple key=value format, which allows easy access using standard CLI tools. Examples:

List all configuration options:

cat /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/options.conf

Show the configured web server:

# grep webserver= /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/options.conf
webserver=apache

Or just use the ./build options command. The output will be formatted:

Current SSL cipher lists for DirectAdmin servers

By default, DirectAdmin uses the intermediate ssl_configuration (set in CustomBuild's options.conf file) to set the cipher lists for the services. ssl_configuration=old/intermediate/modern are set based on the lists provided by Mozilla's Handy cipher generator.