Introduction

Farbot automates building of netinstall/PXE boot FreeBSD releases. It features a simple configuration file based on the concept of "Installations", "!PackageSets", and "!PartitionMaps."

Farbot currently handles the following:

• Building FreeBSD releases, including grabbing any source needed. It is also possible to just extract a release from a FreeBSD CD ISO if a custom build is unnecessary.
• Building packages for each release, derived from per installation package sets.
• Laying out an NFS/TFTP exportable file system structure for all built releases, customized for each installation type.
• Generation of a customized bootloader with options to install each installation type.

Requirements

• Python 2.4 or greater
• Zconfig
• To actually perform a release build farbot must be running on a FreeBSD host.

Installation

Farbot uses the standard Python distutils. To install, run setup.py:

./setup.py install

Farbot includes a suite of tests which can be run before installing if desired:

./runtests.py

Farbot will be installed in the Python site-packages directory. The farbot command line tool will be installed in the Python-specified bin directory. An example configuration file, farbot.conf, is supplied with the source distribution.

Farbot is also available in the FreeBSD ports collection as sysutils/farbot.