Hi everyone,

Now that we’ve got the FreeBSD 6.2 VM booted up under VMware Player or VMware Server, we need to make sure that we’ve got the latest version of the ports tree installed. Since you may be reading this well after I build the original VM image, the FreeBSD ports tree has probably changed a lot, and it’s possible that new versions of the PHP frameworks are available.

First of all, what is the ports tree? Quite simply, it’s a large collection of directories (18,000+ at last count!), one for every 3rd party software package that has been ported to FreeBSD. What does this gain you? The idea is that any piece of ported software can be installed on your FreeBSD system as easily as typing the following command in the appropriate directory:

cd /usr/ports/<category>/<appname> && make install clean

e.g.

cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql50-server && make install clean

That’s it! The same command will install anything from a simple Perl module to the Java development kit.

The command to update your FreeBSD VM with the latest ports tree is equally simple. Log in as root and type the following:

portsnap fetch update

You’ll see some output like this:

Sample FreeBSD portsnap run

Now we’re ready to install some PHP frameworks, but that’s a post for another day!