# Running Elm on FreeBSD

**URL:** <https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/running-elm-on-freebsd/1613>\
**Category:** Show and Tell\
**Created:** [August 7, 2018, 3:45pm UTC](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/running-elm-on-freebsd/1613 "2018-08-07T15:45:29Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![psagers](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b5a626/32.png) [@psagers](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/u/psagers)\
**Post date:** [August 7, 2018, 3:45pm UTC](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/running-elm-on-freebsd/1613/1 "2018-08-07T15:45:29Z")

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I work primarily on FreeBSD these days, which makes it a bit difficult to play with Elm. I’ve cobbled together builds in the past, but not in a very systematic way. This week I finally sat down to set up repeatable builds–including sandboxed installations of old versions of GHC and cabal–and produce a binary package for installation. The repo is at [https://bitbucket.org/psagers/elm-freebsd](https://bitbucket.org/psagers/elm-freebsd), so if you’re looking for FreeBSD support, this should get you going.

Ideally, this would eventually be levered into a proper FreeBSD port, but I haven’t tried to tackle that yet. The install prefix is configurable, so in principle it would be easy to produce npm-compatible binaries with this. If anyone with a commit bit would like to pursue that, let me know. Note, however, that FreeBSD releases a new major version every two years or so and they are explicitly [not ABI-compatible](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/updating-upgrading-freebsdupdate.html#freebsdupdate-portsrebuild) with each other. So Elm’s current ship-one-binary-and-declare-victory-forever distribution strategy would need to be elaborated a little.

(Come to think of it, that point may be relevant to Linux as well. Is it only a matter of time before a major distribution takes a new version of libgmp or some other elm dependency and comedy ensues? An issue for another day, perhaps.)

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**Author:** ![system](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex035/uploads/elm_lang/original/1X/50a05e53677a2c3b47776d7abd0f113eb50193a1.png) [@system](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/u/system)\
**Post date:** [August 17, 2018, 3:45pm UTC](https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/running-elm-on-freebsd/1613/2 "2018-08-17T15:45:32Z")

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