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 +href="growth/status.png">growing at a tremendous rate.
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.
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.
The ports listed on these web pages are continually being updated. It is recommended that you refresh the entire collection together, as many ports depend on other parts of the tree. If that is not possible, at least make sure you get the latest make macro files in ports/Mk. (If you are using cvsup, this means you need ports-base in your cvsupfile.) If you still see errors even with the latest bsd.port.mk and friends, please fetch the entire collection.
The current ports tree officially supports only FreeBSD-current and FreeBSD-stable. Consequently, you may need to update a few files on your FreeBSD system to make use of ports developed after your version of FreeBSD was released. Please install one of the following depending on the release you are running. If your system is newer than any of the packages listed below, you do not need an upgrade package. If your system is older than 4.1-RELEASE, or is running any branch before 4.1, your only reasonable choice for using ports-current is to upgrade to some point along the 4.x branch.
These are FreeBSD packages; please use pkg_add to install them. That should enable you to use all the ports listed here. Note that it will only change just enough files to enable ports/packages to be used; for a full upgrade to -STABLE, please refer to the synchronizing your source tree section of the handbook. The 2.2.x and 3.x branches are officially unsupported by ports-current. While the ports tree as distributed with previous releases will probably work well these are also unsupported by the ports team, because time is already stretched thin enough supporting ports-current.
Many of the ports require the X Window System to compile and run. We compile and test our ports on XFree86. Their current release is 3.3.6. Some ports may not work with older or newer releases.