The FreeBSD Ports Collection provides an easy and consistent way of installing software ported to FreeBSD. It uses Makefiles laid out in a directory hierarchy, so software can be installed and deinstalled with the make command. Ports collections (or ports trees, or just ports) are the sets of makefiles and patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. ... make is a computer program that automates the compilation of programs whose files are dependent on each other. ...

When installing an application, very little (if any) user intervention is required after issuing the initial command. In most cases, the application is automatically downloaded from the Internet, patched and configured if necessary, compiled, installed, and registered in the package database. Any dependencies on other applications or libraries a port may have are also installed for the user.

Each port, or software package, is maintained by a "port maintainer", an individual who is responsible for staying current with the latest software developments. Anyone is welcome to become a port maintainer by contributing their favorite piece of software to the collection. One may also choose to adopt and maintain an existing port that has no maintainership.

Due to the size of the Ports Collection and with new software being contributed on a regular basis, many users will never have to look elsewhere for third party applications. As of April 18 2006, there were over 14,350 pieces of software available in the collection. April 18 is the 108th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (109th in leap years). ...

Precompiled (binary) ports are called "packages", and are available for download. FreeBSD maintains a build farm (the "pointyhat cluster") that is used to build all packages across all architectures and all major releases. Build logs and errors for all the ports built by the pointyhat cluster are available [1].

The precompiled packages are separated into categories by architecture for which they are available. They are further separated into several directories. There are "release" directories for each of the current production releases which are built from the ports collection shipped with the release, and are not updated thereafter. There are also "stable" and "current" directories for several major release branches. They are updated roughly once a week. In almost all cases, a package created for an older version of FreeBSD can be installed and used on a newer system without difficulty as binary backward compatibility across major releases is enabled by default. IA32 binary compatibility layer also makes it possible to use many i386 packages on an amd64 system.

If you know the name of the package you would like to install, the installation can be entirely automated by passing the package name to the pkg_add -r command. The appropriate package for your release will then be downloaded and installed along with any software dependencies it may have. By default, packages will be downloaded from the main FreeBSD distribution site.

External links

• FreeBSD - The Official FreeBSD Site.
• FreeBSD Ports - A browsable database of software ported to FreeBSD.