FreeBSD includes the Crystal compiler in the ports tree, starting from version FreeBSD 11.0.

Currently, it is only available for aarch64 and amd64 platforms.

When building Crystal code with the --release flag on FreeBSD, the --no-debug flag should be added too in order to avoid LLVM assertion errors.

Install Package

Crystal is available as a compiled package. However, it might not be the most recent version available.

sudo pkg install -y crystal shards

If you’re on a -RELEASE version of FreeBSD, by default pkg is configured for the quarterly package set, which is updated every quarter (except for security patches, which are included ASAP).

To switch to latest for quicker updates, create a file /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf with the following contents:

FreeBSD: {
  url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest"
}

Install Port

For building Crystal yourself, the required installation is available in the ports tree.

If the ports collection is not already installed, it can be downloaded using portsnap fetch or git clone https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports.

sudo make -C/usr/ports/lang/crystal reinstall clean
sudo make -C/usr/ports/devel/shards reinstall clean

To avoid building LLVM from source (which can take a long time), you can first install it from binary packages if you don’t have it installed yet:

sudo pkg install -y llvm60

Alternatively, use a smart port builder like Synth, which automatically decides to download dependencies as binary packages when there’s no reason to rebuild them.