Installing Wt on FreeBSD¶

Just a few notes to help FreeBSD users to build Wt. I tested those tips on FreeBSD 7.2.

• For the cmake options :

  cmake -DBOOST_DIR=/usr/local -DBOOST_FS_LIB_MT=/usr/local -DBOOST_FS_LIB_MT=/usr/local/lib/libboost_filesystem.so ../

• This will build a non-threaded version of Wt, which is fine for playing around with the features, but a multi-threaded Wt build is to be preferred. Although boost for FreeBSD is multi-threaded, they do not have the signature mt in their library names, which is taken by the Wt build process as an indication that the boost libraries are multi-threaded. To force Wt to make a multi-threaded build, you need to edit your CMakeCache.txt and copy the value of each BOOST_xx_LIB variable to BOOST_xx_LIB_MT, specify the BOOST_THREAD_LIB_MT library, and add -lpthread to the WtFindBoost.txt cmake script (lines 223 - 229):

 SET(BOOST_WT_LIBRARIES
        ${BOOST_THREAD_LIB_MT}
        ${BOOST_REGEX_LIB_MT}
        ${BOOST_SIGNALS_LIB_MT}
        ${BOOST_SYSTEM_LIB_MT}
        ${BOOST_PO_LIB_MT}
        ${BOOST_DT_LIB_MT} -lpthread)

When running make, you should then get a line that says:

 ** Enabling multi threading.

• Be sure to specify "www" for the WEBUSER and WEBGROUP configuration variables. Otherwise Wt will use "apache" user/group which doesn't exist by default on FreeBSD.

• To compile some examples, you need to replace "png12" by "png" because the PNG libray is simply named "libpng.so" on FreeBSD.

I hope those simple tips will help FreeBSD users to install and try Wt.