For full details, please read https://doc.powerdns.com/md/recursor/
Here follow some brief notes that may be useful to get you going.
Starting with version 4.0.0, the PowerDNS recursor uses autotools and compiling from the tarball can be as simple as
$ ./configure
$ make
As for dependencies, Boost (http://boost.org/) and OpenSSL (https://openssl.org/) are required.
On most modern UNIX distributions, you can simply install 'boost' or 'boost-dev' or 'boost-devel'. Otherwise, just download boost, and point the compiler at the right directory using CPPFLAGS.
On Debian and Ubuntu, the following will get you the dependencies:
$ apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-serialization-dev libssl-dev g++ make pkg-config
Source code is available on GitHub:
$ git clone https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns.git
This repository contains the sources for the PowerDNS Recursor, the PowerDNS
Authoritative Server, and dnsdist (a powerful DNS loadbalancer). The sources for
the recursor are located in the pdns/recursordist subdirectory of the repository.
To compile from a git checkout, install pandoc, ragel, automake and autoconf. Then run
$ cd pdns/pdns/recursordist/
$ ./bootstrap
$ ./configure
$ make
To benefit from Lua scripting, as described on https://doc.powerdns.com/md/recursor/scripting/
Install Lua and development headers. PowerDNS supports Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and LuaJIT.
On Debian/Ubuntu, install e.g. liblua5.2-dev to use Lua 5.2.
The configure script will automatically detect the Lua version. If more than one
version of Lua is installed, the --with-lua configure flag can be set to the
desired version. e.g.:
$ ./configure --with-lua=lua51
(On older versions of Debian/Ubuntu, you'll need to pass --with-lua=lua5.1 instead.)
After compiling, run pdns\_recursor --config to view the configuration options
and a short description. The full documentation is online at
https://doc.powerdns.com/md/recursor/
Bugs can be reported on GitHub: https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/issues, please check first if your issue is not fixed in the latest version or has already been reported.
PowerDNS is copyright © 2001-2018 by PowerDNS.COM BV and lots of contributors, using the GNU GPLv2 license (see NOTICE for the exact license and exception used).