Installing ag: the silver searcher on CentOS.

InstallingAgOnCentOS.md

Installing ag on CentOS

Prerequistes

• libpcre
• liblzma

Download, build and install

$ sudo yum install -y pcre-devel

$ sudo yum install xz-devel

$ cd /usr/local/src

$ sudo git clone https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher.git

$ cd the_silver_searcher

$ sudo ./build.sh

$ sudo make install

$ which ag
/usr/local/bin/ag

Also... yum provides the_silver_searcher

On CentOS 8, you can also build an RPM using the CentOS 7 SRPM. Something like the following worked for me.

curl -O https://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/SRPMS/Packages/t/the_silver_searcher-2.1.0-1.el7.src.rpm
yum install -y rpm-build xz-devel bash-completion
rpmbuild --rebuild the_silver_searcher-2.1.0-1.el7.src.rpm
sudo yum install $HOME/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/the_silver_searcher-2.1.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

yum install -y https://dl.bintray.com/subchen/yum-repo/the_silver_searcher-2.1.0-1.el8.x86_64.rpm

If you get:

src/zfile.c:63:9: error: unknown type name ‘z_stream’
         z_stream gz;

you have additional dependency missing:

yum install -y zlib-devel