Please ignore the "Releases" thing that Github automatically creates for every source control tag without my knowledge or ability to stop them.

Instead, download the actual release distributions from the Downloads wiki page.

You can tell an actual release distribution because it contains a ./configure script.

s3backer requires the following additional packages:

On various different systems, these may be already installed and/or have different package names.

This should be all that's required for Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libfuse-dev libexpat1-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev pkg-config

Use Homebrew to install s3backer on Mac OS X. Note that for unknown reason the package is named s3-backer (with a dash).

If you are running openSUSE or a few other Linux variants, you can find pre-built RPMs in the usual places.

Like lots of other software packages, s3backer uses GNU Autoconf for its build process so once you have installed the other required packages, building and installing s3backer is usually as easy as:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

If you've cloned the Github project, to build the distribution source tarball you'll need autoconf, automake, etc. installed, then:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make dist

If you want to allow normal users to mount s3backer filesystems, you need to add the user_allow_other option to /etc/fuse.conf. It must be on a line by itself.

For example:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo user_allow_other >> /etc/fuse.conf'

You can have your s3backer disk mounted automatically via /etc/fstab. See Configuring fstab.