Installing the Kea Premium Hook Libraries from Sources - Kea 2.6.4 and older

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  • Published on Aug 26, 2025
  • 2 minute(s) read
  • Suzanne Goldlust
  • Wlodzimierz Wencel
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For Kea versions 2.6.4 and earlier, purchasing the Kea Premium hooks from the ISC website provides an email with a link to download the source tarball or to install a pre-compiled package for your operating system. This KB article takes you through the process of building and adding the hooks to your Kea configuration if you decide to build from source.

Since the release of Kea 3.0.0 in July 2025, most of the hooks that were previously in the Premium package are now open source. The Premium package is no longer available for purchase; the Configuration Backend and Role-Based Access Control hooks are now only available with an ISC support contract.

Building and Installing the Hooks

  1. Download the Kea Premium hooks packages. The result will be a file with a name similar to kea-premium-2.6.4.tar.gz.

  2. If you do not have the sources for the corresponding version of the open source Kea package on your system, extract the Kea source from the original tarball you downloaded. For example, if you downloaded Kea 2.6.4, you should have a tarball called kea-2.6.4.tar.gz on your system. Unpack this tarball:

$ tar -xf kea-2.6.4.tar.gz

This will unpack the tarball into the kea-2.6.4 subdirectory of your current working directory.

  1. Unpack the Kea Premium tarball into the directory into which Kea was unpacked. For example, assuming that you followed step 2 and that Kea 2.6 has been unpacked into a kea-2.6.4 subdirectory, and that the Kea Premium tarball is in your current directory, the following steps will unpack the premium tarball into the correct location.
$ cd kea-2.6.4
$ tar -xf ../kea-premium-2.6.4.tar.gz

Note that unpacking the Kea Premium package will put the files into a directory named premium.

  1. Kea 2.6.4 and older versions use autotools (the Kea build system has been migrated to meson since version 3.0.0).
$ autoreconf -if
  1. After step 4, the configure script will be available; please refer to Kea official documentation for configure options or use ./configure -h.
  2. Configure Kea compilation using ./configure [options]. The first section of the output should look something like:
       Kea source configure results:
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Package:
  Name:              kea
  Version:           2.6.4
  Extended version:  2.6.4 (tarball)
  Version type:      stable
  OS Family:         Linux

  Prefix:            /usr/local
  Hooks directory:   /usr/local/lib/kea/hooks
  Premium hooks:     yes (tarball)
  Included Hooks:    ddns_tuning forensic_log flex_id host_cmds

The last line indicates whether the premium package has been detected and which hooks will be compiled.

6. Build Kea.

$ make
  1. If you are building Kea for the first time or want to re-install it, you should run:
$ sudo make install

This will install Kea and its hook libraries.

The exact installation location depends on whether you specified the --prefix parameter to the configure script. If you haven't, the default is /usr/local/lib/kea/hooks.

You can verify the libraries are installed properly with this command:

$ ls -l /usr/local/lib/kea/hooks/*.so

You should see:

/usr/local/lib/kea/hooks/libdhcp_flex_id.so
/usr/local/lib/kea/hooks/libdhcp_host_cmds.so
...

Configuration of the Hook Libraries

For configuration documentation, please refer to the Kea Administrator Reference Manual or the current version of this document.