FreeBSD build guide

(updated for FreeBSD 12.0)

This guide describes how to build bitcoind and command-line utilities on FreeBSD.

This guide does not contain instructions for building the GUI.

Preparation

You will need the following dependencies, which can be installed as root via pkg:

pkg install autoconf automake boost-libs git gmake libevent libtool pkgconf

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git

In order to run the test suite (recommended), you will need to have Python 3 installed:

pkg install python3

See dependencies.md for a complete overview.

BerkeleyDB is only necessary for the wallet functionality. To skip this, pass --disable-wallet to ./configure and skip to the next section.

./contrib/install_db4.sh `pwd`
export BDB_PREFIX="$PWD/db4"

Important: Use gmake (the non-GNU make will exit with an error).

With wallet:

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-gui=no \
    BDB_LIBS="-L${BDB_PREFIX}/lib -ldb_cxx-4.8" \
    BDB_CFLAGS="-I${BDB_PREFIX}/include" \
    MAKE=gmake

Without wallet:

./autogen.sh
./configure --with-gui=no --disable-wallet MAKE=gmake

followed by:

gmake # use -jX here for parallelism
gmake check # Run tests if Python 3 is available