About FreeBSD Ports
The FreeBSD ports and packages collections offer two simple ways for users and administrators to install over 34,000 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.
Last modified on: September 17, 2023 by Wolfram Schneider