Building Zed for FreeBSD

FreeBSD is not currently a supported platform, so this guide is a work in progress.

Repository

Clone the Zed repository.

Dependencies

• Install the necessary system packages and rustup:

  script/freebsd
  

  If preferred, you can inspect script/freebsd and perform the steps manually.

Building from source

Once the dependencies are installed, you can build Zed using Cargo.

For a debug build of the editor:

cargo run

And to run the tests:

cargo test --workspace

In release mode, the primary user interface is the cli crate. You can run it in development with:

cargo run -p cli

WebRTC Notice

Building webrtc-sys on FreeBSD currently fails due to missing upstream support and unavailable prebuilt binaries. As a result, collaboration features that depend on WebRTC (audio calls and screen sharing) are temporarily disabled.

See [Issue #15309: FreeBSD Support] and [Discussion #29550: Unofficial FreeBSD port for Zed] for more.

Troubleshooting

Cargo errors claiming that a dependency is using unstable features

Try cargo clean and cargo build.