Installing FreeBSD Packages

Warning

These packages are not supported by the pfSense® development team. They may break the firewall, be careful!

In addition to the packages available in the pfSense package system, thousands of additional FreeBSD packages are available. If strong security is desired for a pfSense firewall then do not install additional FreeBSD packages, or ensure to properly maintain these packages by always keeping them up to date. This is especially true of packages that act as servers, listening for network requests. Packages only accessible from the local system, such as command line utilities, are usually of less risk though they can also open security holes.

Startup Script Notes

The usual rc.d scripts added to /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ will not function on a pfSense system. There is no rc.conf and one cannot be created as it will be deleted. A custom startup script must be created in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ and its name must end with .sh and it must be marked executable (chmod +x), and it will run at boot time. Alternatively if it’s something that can be started with a single command then it can easily be added as a <shellcmd> in config.xml.

pfSense software version 2.4

pfSense software version 2.4 is based on pkg for the base system and pfSense packages, so the pfSense pkg repository is used and the standard FreeBSD package repository is not available. Installing packages from FreeBSD is technically possible, but not recommended due to potential dependency problems. Passing the full URL to a package using pkg add <url> will work, but care is needed to avoid future problems.

List of native FreeBSD packages can be found here: http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/

Example

If you would like to install sendmail for example you would run:

pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/sendmail+tls+sasl2-8.15.2_22.txz

To find out that it relies on a dependency:

pkg: Missing dependency 'cyrus-sasl-saslauthd'

So to successfully install the package first install whatever it depends on depending on the package desired there can be a long list of dependencies:

pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/cyrus-sasl-saslauthd-2.1.27_1.txz
pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/sendmail+tls+sasl2-8.15.2_22.txz
rehash

Then after trying to send a mail with:

/usr/local/bin/sendEmail -f from@gmail.com -t to@gmail.com -u "Mail Subject" -m "Mail body write your content here." -s smtp.gmail.com:587 -xu <USERNAME> -xp <PASSWORD> -o tls=yes -a attachment.txt ;

sendEmail[80603]: ERROR => No TLS support! SendEmail can't load required libraries. (try installing Net::SSLeay and IO::Socket::SSL)

The error tells it needs 2 additional libraries which in turn need additional dependencies. So there is another set of packages which then needs to be installed:

pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/p5-Net-SSLeay-1.88.txz
pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/p5-IO-Socket-IP-0.39.txz
pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/p5-Mozilla-CA-20180117.txz
pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/p5-Socket-2.029.txz
pkg add http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:11:x86:64/latest/All/p5-IO-Socket-SSL-2.068.txz