FreeBSD Install

Building Chia from Source for FreeBSD 11

Tested on FreeBSD 11.3- and 11.4-RELEASE

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Currently, the only way to ensure a FreeBSD build is to do it from source. By following these instructions to the letter, you should have no problem building the latest Chia from source on a FreeBSD 11.3 or 11.4. This should also work on FreeBSD 12, possibly with some modifications - for instance if the ports py-cryptography version is newer than 3.3.2, simply edit as needed - or if your preferred Python version is 3.8 or 3.9 I believe it should all still work considering you modify the package names as necessary.

FreeNAS / TrueNAS

If you had been using NFS or Samba sharing to expose your plots to a harvester on another OS, such as Linux, you can instead build Chia within a jail (see the FreeNAS manual for 'jails'), expose your plot directories to it and run the harvester within. In my experience, it provides lower-latency and more reliable access to the plots since the disks are direct-attached and not being provided through an extra few layers of network protocols.

If you are using a fresh jail created by the FreeNAS web GUI you may need to install openssh and setup a ssh key to login as root because by default it appears PAM password logins do not work. The jail shell CLI provided by the FreeNAS GUI allows copy and pasting so you can easily paste your public-key into /root/.ssh/authorized_keys && chmod -R 700 /root/.ssh.

These instructions would be applicable to 11.3 and 11.4 jails created within FreeNAS 11 only. Version 12 (FreeBSD 12) has not yet been tested.

Other Notes

These instructions will have you building both chia-blockchain and clvm_rs from github source, and python-cryptography from FreeBSD's ports.

The result of this build will be the "chia version" showing the current release branch ahead by 1 and in "dev0"; for instance building 1.0.1 results in "chia version" returning "1.0.2.dev0". If someone knows why this is and how to fix it, please, edit and correct this! It does not happen on Linux.

These instructions assume a fresh FreeBSD 11 installation!

Discouraged?

Following the instructions in this document will result in a working Chia CLI build on FreeBSD 11 if you follow step-by-step starting from a vanilla FreeBSD installation. Is something broken? Compare the commands you typed, accessible in your bash shell history, and match them with each command in this document. If you feel you've messed something up, do the following:

# if you have (venv) in your shell prompt, type deactivate
deactivate
# remove the chia-blockchain directory which will contain clvm_rs and the Python venv
rm -rf chia-blockchain
# ... now start again!

Pre-requisite package installation

If starting the build again after a failure and you have not re-installed FreeBSD, don't just skip this package installation section! You may have missed one or more software packages critical to the build.

The 'pkg', 'portsnap' and port build are to be run as root. Everything else can be run from a normal non-root user.

As root, update pkg and ports, and then install all packages as instructed below.

# Update your packages and ports; if ports are already installed as part of your fresh install run portsnap update instead of fetch/extract.
pkg update
portsnap fetch && portsnap extract

# Install bash if you have not; the default csh will not suffice for the build scripts.
pkg install bash
# change your shell to bash
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash
# run bash
/usr/local/bin/bash

Make sure you change the shell for your non-root chia-blockchain user. If you're opting to run Chia as root, you can skip this. If you are root, run this as it appears below; otherwise, you can omit the username because you are already that user.

chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash NONROOT_USERNAME

Now proceed with installing the mandatory development tools.

pkg install lang/gcc9 gcc gmake cmake

gcc notes

After installing gcc version 9.0, 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

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.

Install rust, Python, and everything else.

pkg install lang/rust
pkg install lang/py37 py37-pip py37-setuptools py37-wheel py37-sqlite3 py37-cffi py37-virtualenv python
pkg install node npm git openssl

If you are ssh'ing into the machine you might want to use 'screen' so that processes will continue even if you logout. For more information: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=screen. 'tmux' is also a great alternative especially if you use iTerm2 on macOS as it supports native tabs and windows with the '-CC' CLI option.

# optional packages
pkg install screen tmux

Repo Cloning and Virtual Environment (venv) Activation

From this point on, with the exception of the security/py-cryptography port build process (and any other exceptions noted), you may proceed as a normal user.

# Clone the latest chia-blockchain repository, via HTTP:
git clone https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git -b latest
# or with SSH:
git clone [email protected]:Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git -b latest
# Note: you can specify the branch by adding "--branch <version>" like: git clone http://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain.git --branch 1.0.1

Create a virtual environment directory 'venv' from within the 'chia-blockchain' directory and activate it before proceeding

cd chia-blockchain
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate 

You are now in the virtual environment that Python (and so chia) will use. You should have a "(venv)" prefix to your terminal prompt to confirm the venv is working.

Upgrade pip:

pip install --upgrade pip

Building clvm_rs 0.1.4

git clone http://github.com/Chia-Network/clvm_rs.git --branch 0.1.4
cd clvm_rs
pip install maturin
maturin develop --release
pip install git+https://github.com/Chia-Network/clvm@use_clvm_rs

clvm_rs 0.1.4 is now installed in your virtual environment.

Building py-cryptography from ports

You'll need to switch to root for this part.

cd /usr/ports/security/py-cryptography

# Instruct 'make' that the SSL library is openssl.
echo "DEFAULT_VERSIONS+=ssl=openssl" >> /etc/make.conf

make

You'll probably see a bunch of warnings and notices; these are not errors and it will build. After it is done building, switch back to your non-root user (if you optioned so). Ensure you are in your venv after switching!

We're going to do our own py-cryptography install since 'make install' does not copy to our venv. (If you know how to change this, please edit).

Copy py-cryptography and its meta-data from the staging directory to your virtual environment.

cp -R /usr/ports/security/py-cryptography/work-py37/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cryptography ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cryptography
cp -R /usr/ports/security/py-cryptography/work-py37/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cryptography-3.3.2-py3.7.egg-info

Clear any Python byte-code cache files that may contain the old path. These should be re-built by the interpreter but we like a clean environment.

find ${VIRTUAL_ENV}/lib/python3.7/site-packages/cryptography -name __pycache__ | xargs -I{} rm -rf "{}"

Chia modifications and Building Chia Itself

Switch to your chia-blockchain clone directory. You will need to edit two files.

Using your favorite text editor, modify setup.py to edit the cryptography package version to 3.3.2.

"cryptography==3.4.6" --> to --> "cryptography==3.3.2"

Now you must modify src/util/keychain.py to provide a static key when using the Python keyring. This is mandatory otherwise every time the keyring is accessed your passphrase will need to be entered on the command line, and for the CLI daemon this will not do.

On line 25 of src/util/keychain.py, change:

elif platform=="linux":

to:

elif platform=="linux" or platform.startswith("freebsd"):

On line 27 of the same file, change the passphrase from "your keyring password" to whatever you wish your passphrase to be. This is intended to be fixed in future versions but, for the time being, Linux and FreeBSD must have the keyphrase provided statically.

keyring.keyring_key = "your keyring password"  # type: ignore

can be changed like so:

keyring.keyring_key = "Too Many Secrets"

Now, you will build Chia!

sh install.sh

Once done, run:

chia init

NOTE: if you need to disable UPnP - a protocol which automatically sets up port-forwarding on routers using NAT which is a typical setup at any residence with broadband - set "enable_upnp: False" in config.yaml. You can use the one-liner below or do it yourself.

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

While you don't absolutely need port 8444 forwarded to your Chia node, it is advised that you do so that other peers may connect to you instead of you solely connecting to them. For the average at-home farmer it is advised you do not disable UPnP unless you absolutely know what you're doing or have another node on your local network already using the port and are planning to Farm on Many Machines).

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Installed and Ready to Farm!

That's it! Provided the instructions were followed to the T, and the build is a fresh FreeBSD 11.3 or 11.4, either hardware or FreeNAS jailed, you should be good to go! Now go to town with chia start node or whatever floats your boat.

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