See below if building the proxy To build memcached in your machine from local repo you will have to install autotools, automake and libevent. In a debian based system that will look like this sudo apt-get install autotools-dev sudo apt-get install automake sudo apt-get install libevent-dev After that you can build memcached binary using automake cd memcached ./autogen.sh ./configure make make test It should create the binary in the same folder, which you can run ./memcached You can telnet into that memcached to ensure it is up and running telnet 127.0.0.1 11211 stats IF BUILDING PROXY, AN EXTRA STEP IS NECESSARY: cd memcached cd vendor ./fetch.sh cd .. ./autogen.sh ./configure --enable-proxy make make test