Skip to content

FreeBSD

This guide is for FreeBSD 15.x-RELEASE.
It should work, with slight modifications, for all other relatively modern versions.
This setup has been verified using a clean jail without any modifications.

For this example we are using: - Redis for the database - /user/home/nodebb for the home directoy of the new nodebb user - /user/local/www/nodebb for the new public directoy of NodeBB

The rest is fairly straight forwarded: - This user needs to be created prior the installation with: 

pw user add -n nodebb -m -s /bin/sh -d /usr/home/nodebb -c "NodeBB User"
chown -R nodebb:nodebb /usr/home/nodebb
  • The directory needs to be created prior the installation with: 
mkdir -p /usr/local/www/nodebb/
chown -R nodebb:nodebb /usr/local/www/nodebb/
  • Make sure your system is up to date and fetching from the "latest" PKG repository by running:
mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
sed -e 's|quarterly|latest|g' /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf > /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
freebsd-update fetch
freebsd-update install
pkg upgrade
  • Install the needed packages with pkg install redis gcc npm git vips node vips
  • Activate Redis and start the service: service redis enable && service redis start
  • Switch to the user nodebb with su nodebb
  • Get the latest code (check out the releases):
cd /usr/local/www/nodebb/
git clone -b v4.x.x https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB.git
cd NodeBB

Version prior including 4.7.2:
Please be aware the the usage of sass-embedded is not (!) working on FreeBSD.
There might be a modification for the file src/utils.js needed.
cp src/utils.js src/utils.js.bak
sed -i '' "s|const sass = require('sass-embedded');|const sass = require('sass');|g" src/utils.jsc
Otherwiese you get stuck in the message sass --embedded is unavailable in pure JS mode

  • Install the needed NPM packages
npm install node-addon-api node-gyp libvips tslib sharp lodash

If you experience any problems while adding the npm packages,
just start from scratch by user npm cache clean --force && rm -rf node_modules

  • Run interactive installation:
.\nodebb setup

You may leave all of the options as default, but choose redis for the database.
After the installation has finished (it takes a while), finally run:

.\nodebb start

Visit your forum at http://FQDN:4567/ to finish configuration and setup.

FQDN is the server fully qualified domain name.