DNS: Install BIND on macOS

The DNS service in macOS Server was simple to setup and manage. It’s a bit more manual in macOS without macOS Server. The underlying service that provides DNS is Bind. Bind will require a compiler to install, so first make sure you have the Xcode command line tools installed. To download Bind, go to ISC at https://www.isc.org/downloads/. From there, copy the installer locally and extract the tar file. Once that’s extracted, run the configure from within the extracted directory:

./configure --enable-symtable=none --infodir="/usr/share/info" --sysconfdir="/etc" --localstatedir="/var" --enable-atomic="no" --with-gssapi=yes --with-libxml2=no

Next, run make:

make

Then run make install:

make install

Now download a LaunchDaemon plist (I just stole this from the org.isc.named.plist on a macOS Server, which can be found at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist or downloaded using that link). The permissions for a custom LaunchDaemon need to be set appropriately:

chmod root:wheel /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist

Then start it up and test it!