Introduction to Ports
You now know about packages and the tools FreeBSD provides for interacting with them. Ports offer another way for you to install software in FreeBSD. You use ports to compile software directly from the source code in an automated procedure that controls and safeguards the installation process as it allows you to grab the source directly from each program’s distribution site.
As convenient as packages are, the traditional “UNIX way” of installing new software has always been to compile it yourself. The administrator finds the distribution site (using either HTTP or FTP, or in an earlier era, a tool such as Gopher or Archie), downloads the source code bundled up in a .tar.gz or .tgz (or .tbz) file, and unpacks it into some ...
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