Ports Tree, Installing

Before you can install any ports in FreeBSD you will need to install the ports collection. The ports tree is placed in /usr/ports/ and consists of the makefiles and information required to properly download and install all of the FreeBSD ports.

The easiest way to install the ports tree is to use sysinstall

> su
(enter root password)
> sysinstall (or /stand/sysinstall for versions < 5.2)
-> Select Configure
-> Select Distributions
-> Select ports
-> go to OK
-> Select installation media, (CDROM, FTP, ...)
-> go to Exit
-> Exit sysinstall (Press X)

You can also go to FreeBSD.org and ftp the latest ports.tar.gz (about 200megs or so,) and uncompress it in /usr. But why do it manually when you've got sysinstall to deal with the hassle for you?

See also: Update the ports tree, Ports, Installing