About FreeBSD Ports¶
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The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install applications. There are currently 25015 ports available.
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 typing make install
in the port
directory. 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, CD-ROM or via
`ftp
<../cgi/man.cgi?query=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 and time of having to compile anything at all. Use
`pkg install
<../cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg-install>`__ to securely
download and install the precompiled version of a port. For more
information see Using pkg for Binary Package
Management