Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes

BSDs generally break their PHP packages into smaller units than most Linux distribution. This means that you need extra packages when following installation guides. I’m installing Phabricator on FreeBSD because I want ZFS under it.

This is the complete list of PHP modules and related stuff I needed to install to get Phabricator to run on FreeBSD 10.0p7/amd64. Don’t use PHP 5.5, as some modules are only available with PHP 5.4.

php5
mod_php5
php5-curl
php5-gd
php5-iconv
php5-mbstring
php5-mysql
php5-pcntl
pecl-APC
php5-filter
pear-Services_JSON
php5-json
php5-hash
php5-openssl
php5-ctype
php5-posix
php5-fileinfo

Restart your web server after installing everything.

Phabricator wants a lot of control over its database. I don’t like giving web applications root privileges on a database. this article by David Antaramian was quite helpful there.

Once you have your user set up, initialize the Phabricator database by running

# ./storage upgrade --user root --password MyRootPassword

This gives the script the access needed to actually create and adjust Phabricator databases.

After that, the Phabricator installer seems to do a good job of walking you through fixing the various setup niggles.

3 Replies to “Phabricator on FreeBSD installation notes”

  1. Great post.

    In FreeBSD pkg repo pear-Services-JSON is named pear-Services_JSON (with an underscore between Services and JSON)

    Best regards
    Ole J

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