March 12, 2025
As part of a larger investment by the Sovereign Tech Agency, the Foundation is pleased to announce commencement of a work package to improve the FreeBSD CI/CD processes.
The Sovereign Tech Agency has commissioned work on five initiatives all designed to advance key areas of FreeBSD strength. This development package is one of those initiatives.
FreeBSD’s continuous integration system enables developers to discover regressions automatically through comprehensive tests. This effort aims to make adoption by new developers less cumbersome and reduce the time and effort required for new contributions to be developed.
Some of the highlights this work aims to make improvements on:
Developer Experience: The project aims to reduce developer friction for maintainers and committers, which should improve recruitment and retention. Making the CI system more accessible and user-friendly will allow developers to test their code without requiring complex third-party services — a key simplification that will enable easier adoption of FreeBSD in custom platforms.
Extension to Ports Collection: A significant advancement will be extending CI coverage to the FreeBSD Ports Collection, which currently lacks a formal CI system. This will represent a major security improvement and give ‘supply chain visibility’ to packages in the Ports Collection. Automation will help with feedback for Port maintainers, creating feedback loops that are missing from the process today.
Standardisation and Modernisation: The project will assess modern CI systems that can cover the base system, ports, and documentation repositories. This standardisation will make the system more maintainable and secure.
As with all projects managed by the FreeBSD Foundation, we will share periodic updates with the community as the project progresses. If you have any questions, please get in touch.