Method 1 - Tested on FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE

pkg install lang/gcc

# if you are ssh or remoting into a machine you might want to use 'screen' so that process will continue even if you logout. For more information: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=screen
pkg install screen
pkg install zsh # if you do not already have this installed

# create and enter a venv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # when using the default tsch shell use: 'activate.csh'

BUILD_VDF_CLIENT=N CXX=g++9 CC=gcc9 pip install chia-blockchain==1.0b5  # takes a while, builds a lot
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/gcc9

# create config files
chia init

# set "enable_upnp: False" in config.yaml

sed -i .bak 's/enable_upnp: True/enable_upnp: False' ~/.chia/beta-1.0b5/config/config.yaml

Now go to town with chia-start-node or whatever.

gcc notes

After installing gcc9, this message appears:

To ensure binaries built with this toolchain find appropriate versions
of the necessary run-time libraries, you may want to link using

  -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc9

So it's probably possible to build the libraries in a way that doesn't require export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib/gcc9. If you know how, click "edit" and dish.

Method 2 - Building from source

The following procedure has been tested on FreeBSD 11.3 and 12.1.

Prerequisite package installation

First, install prerequisite packages (as root, or using sudo):

pkg install git gmake cmake node npm py37-sqlite3-3.7.7_7

Note: If a more recent version of Python is already installed, the py37-sqlite3-3.7.7_7 package should be replaced with the version matching the installed version of Python 3.x (which can be found by executing the pkg search py3.*sqlite3 command).

Fetch source code

Then, as any user, use git to fetch the chia-blockchain source code, using SSH or HTTPS:

# clone via SSH
git clone [email protected]:Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git
# OR
# clone via HTTPS
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git

Build

Change directory into the chia-blockchain directory, and run the main install script. All programs will be installed into a Python virtual environment in the "venv" sub-directory:

cd chia-blockchain

# for now, build using the dev branch (current master branch has build issues)
git checkout dev

sh install.sh

The command line tools should now be available for use in the created venv, which can be activated using:

cd chia-blockchain
. ./activate

More details can be found in the Chia Quick Start Guide.