Most of our server platforms are running Linux of one kind or another. Occasionally requirements arise that FreeBSD platforms are needed to allow projects to proceed. In this article we present a record of a recent setup for our test server running FreeBSD 8.1 as a guest on VMware. It covers installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP for preparation of installing Joomla! 1.5.

Here we assume you have already had a basic installation of FreeBSD 8.1 on your machine, virtual or otherwise. And, of course, you have to be the root user to add packages and modify configurations. We will go ahead and describe the installation and setup of necessary packages so that Joomla! 1.5 can be successfully installed.

Update the ports tree

Even though we tried to rely on the package repository exclusively for our installations, there are situations we had to make use of the ports tree. So it's better to have up-to-date ports tree. The commands for fetching complete ports tree are:

# portsnap fetch
# portsnap extract 

It takes a little while to retrieve and uncompress the directory structure. Please be patient. Once it's done, you should see a full ports tree at /usr/ports.