IMPORTANT NOTE: This is the master branch of freenas, which is used only for the creation and testing of 9.3-Nightlies builds. If you are building or developing for:

• FreeNAS 10: Use the freenas10/development branch (and see the README there)
• 9.3-STABLE: Use the 9.3-STABLE branch

Building FreeNAS

To build the system (experts only):

Requirements:

• Your build environment must be FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE (building on FreeBSD 10 or 11 is not supported at this time).

• an amd64 capable processor. 8GB of memory, or an equal/greater amount of swap space, is also required

• You will need the following ports/packages when compiling anything FreeNAS-related:

  • ports-mgmt/poudriere-devel
  • devel/git
  • sysutils/cdrtools
  • archivers/pxz
  • lang/python (2.7 or later, with THREADS support)
  • sysutils/grub2-pcbsd
  • sysutils/xorriso
  • py27-sphinx
  • py27-sphinxcontrib-httpdomain-1.2.1 (and all the dependencies that these ports/pkgs install, of course)

Building the System Quickstart Flow:

• Checking out the code from git:

% cd /path/to/your-build-filesystem
% git clone git://github.com/freenas/freenas.git
% cd freenas

• Build it

% make checkout
% make release

• Update the source tree, to pull in new source code changes

% make update

This will also fetch TrueOS and ports for the build from github.

The End Result:

If your build completes successfully, you'll have 64 bit release products in the release_stage directory. You will also have a tarball in your build directory containing the entire release for easy transport.