Installing Lazarus on FreeBSD

Installing Lazarus on FreeBSD

The following applies to FreeBSD 13.x (i386, amd64), 14.x (i386, amd64) and 15-CURRENT (aarch64, amd64) only. Earlier FreeBSD versions are end-of-life and not supported.

via the Ports tree

Currently, two versions of Lazarus are available in the FreeBSD ports tree v3.6.0 (release version) and v4.99 (development version). The latest version of the Free Pascal Compiler in the ports tree is v3.2.3 and v3.3.1 (development version). You can install the GTK2 version, QT5 version or QT6 version of Lazarus as follows:

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus && make install clean

or

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus-qt5 && make install clean

or

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus-qt6 && make install clean

If you want use development (aka trunk) version of Lazarus do the following:

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus-devel && make install clean

or

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus-qt5-devel && make install clean

or

# cd /usr/ports/editors/lazarus-qt6-devel && make install clean

Note: Installing Lazarus will also install the Free Pascal Compiler and its source files.

via the pkg system

# pkg install editors/lazarus

or

# pkg install editors/lazarus-qt5

or

# pkg install editors/lazarus-qt6

or

# pkg install editors/lazarus-devel

or

# pkg install editors/lazarus-qt5-devel

or

# pkg install editors/lazarus-qt6-devel

Lazarus should install the Free Pascal Compiler source files. If you don't have them, you can add them:

# pkg install lang/fpc-source

If you start Lazarus IDE at this point by typing lazarus you will get a dialog which needs you to input the directory in which the Free Pascal source files are located. Set it to /usr/local/share/fpc-source-3.2.3

via the Lazarus repository

This option will often be used if you want to follow Lazarus trunk, a fixes branch, or some other release (eg compiling from a source tarball).

• Use the SubVersion or Git repositories to checkout a copy of the source code you want, or unpack a downloaded source archive into a suitable location. Recent versions of FreeBSD include the svn command as svnlite , so you do not need to install full Subversion package to checkout a copy of the source code.

• The readme.txt file in Lazarus directory mentions make clean all. This only works if you are using Linux. Under FreeBSD you need to replace make with gmake and ensure that you have also installed the GNU gmake from ports.

cd /path/to/lazarus_source
      gmake distclean all bigide

What does the bigide make argument do?

The bigide make argument adds a bunch of packages to Lazarus that many find useful and cannot do without. The packages that are added are:

The above list is sourced from the [Lazarus source directory]/IDE/Makefile.fpc and may be subject to change.

Note that if you have not compiled your own Lazarus IDE with the bigide argument, you can install any of these packages yourself using the Lazarus IDE Package > Install/Uninstall Packages... dialog.

Installation troubleshooting

Troubleshooting details that should (hopefully) be applicable across platforms may be found in the article Installation Troubleshooting.

Some additional notes for FreeBSD installations can be found in the articles FreeBSD and Installing the Free Pascal Compiler.

Multiple Lazarus installs

Please see Multiple Lazarus for details on having more than one Lazarus version installed on one system. We cover issues that can arise due to multiple Lazarus installs here, because they can also happen when installing over a previous version.

Lazarus FAQ

The Lazarus FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions - page is available here.

Installing old versions

See Installation hints for old versions

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "Installing Lazarus on FreeBSD", as the Internet Archive kept it on 2025-06-16, last changed on 2024-11-17. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.