About FreeBSD Ports

The FreeBSD ports and packages collections offer two simple ways for users and administrators to install over 30,000 applications, utilities or libraries.

For most of those, a precompiled package with default options exists for each supported release, saving the user the work and time of having to compile anything at all. Use pkg-install(8) to securely download and install a package. For more information see Using pkg for Binary Package Management.

Both collections support the latest point release on the FreeBSD-STABLE branches. In addition, the ports collection supports the FreeBSD-CURRENT branch. Older releases are not supported and may or may not work correctly with an up-to-date ports collection. Over time, changes to the ports collection may rely on features that are not present in older releases. When this occurs, patches contributed by the user community to maintain support for older releases will usually be committed.

Each port listed here contains any patches necessary to make the original application source code compile and run on FreeBSD. If you download the framework for the entire list of ports by installing the ports hierarchy, you can have thousands of applications right at your fingertips.

Each port’s Makefile automatically fetches the application source code, either from a local disk or the network, unpacks it on your system, applies the patches, and compiles. If all went well, a simple make install will install the application and register it with the package system.