Building FreeNAS 11 from Scratch

Note: All these commands must be run as root.

Requirements:

• Hardware

  • CPU: amd64-compatible 64-bit Intel or AMD CPU.
  • 16GB memory, or the equivalent in memory plus swap space
  • at least 80GB of free disk space

• Operating System

  • The build environment must be FreeBSD 11.x (or 11-STABLE) (building on FreeBSD 10 or 12 is not supported at this time).

Make Targets

• checkout creates a local working copy of the git repositories with git clone

• update does a git pull to update the local working copy with any changes made to the git repositories since the last update

• release actually builds the FreeNAS release

• clean removes previously built files

Procedure

• Install git

  pkg install -y git
  rehash
  

• Clone the build repository (/usr/build is used for this example):

  git clone https://github.com/freenas/build /usr/build
  

• Install Dependencies

  cd /usr/build
  make bootstrap-pkgs
  python3 -m ensurepip
  python3 pip install six
  

• First-time checkout of source:

  make checkout
  

A FreeNAS release is built by first updating the source, then building:

make update
make release

To build the SDK version:

make update
make release BUILD_SDK=yes

Clean builds take a while, not just due to operating system builds, but because poudriere has to build all of the ports. Later builds are faster, only rebuilding files that need it.

Use make clean to remove all built files.

Results

Built files are in the freenas/_BE subdirectory, /usr/build/freenas/_BE in this example.

ISO files: freenas/_BE/release/FreeNAS-11-MASTER-{date}/x64/.

Update files: freenas/_BE/release/.

Log files: freenas/_BE/objs/logs/.