FreeBSD Ports

The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install applications. The ports collection has been growing at a tremendous rate.

The Ports Collection supports the latest release on the FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE branches. 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. Wherever convenient, we try not to gratuitously break support for recent releases, but it is sometimes unavoidable. 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. Installing an application is as simple as downloading the port, unpacking it and typing make in the port directory. For even greater convenience, you can simply install the entire ports hierarchy at installation time (or use CVSup to track it on an ongoing basis) and have thousands of applications right at your fingertips. Each port's Makefile automatically fetches the application source code, either from a local disk, CDROM or via ftp, 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.

For most ports, a precompiled package also exists, saving the user the work of having to compile anything at all. Each port contains a link to its corresponding package and you may either simply download that file and then run the pkg_add command on it or you can simply grab the link location and hand it straight to pkg_add since it's capable of accepting FTP URLs as well as filenames.

For more information about new, changed or removed ports/packages, or if you wish to search for a specific application to see if it's available as a port/package, please see the FreeBSD Ports Changes page.

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For more information about using ports, see Installing Applications: Packages and Ports, a section of the FreeBSD Handbook. For information about creating new ports, see the Porter's Handbook.

There are currently 9662 ports in the FreeBSD Ports Collection.
Download a gzip'd tar file of all 9662 ports (about 21 megabytes) or browse the following categories:

Last modified: 5-January-2004