Very cool projet :)

[Oxyaxion]

I was struggling to deploy immich by hand with podman for months until I found your project.
Congrat for the great work. I hope it will find a great success :)

Question how to add new applications in the projet ? Example I would like to deploy Bichon mail archiver https://github.com/rustmailer/bichon which can be a bit annoying to build on jail due to lack of documenation and annoying vite.js libraries ..

[ahze]

Thanks @Oxyaxion! Really glad the project is useful to you.

Great question about adding new applications. We'd love to have Bichon in the lineup—and we'd welcome a contribution if you're interested in porting it!

How we approach new images:

Our general philosophy follows a simple hierarchy:

1. If upstream provides a FreeBSD binary (like Radarr, Sonarr, Plex) - we download it directly, similar to how their Linux Dockerfile works, just adapted for FreeBSD paths and our s6 supervision setup.
2. If the app is in FreeBSD ports (like Vaultwarden, PostgreSQL, Traefik) - we use pkg install and inherit all the work the ports maintainers have done. This is the simplest path.
3. If neither exists (like Bichon) - we build from source. For Rust apps this is usually straightforward since Rust has solid FreeBSD support. The upstream Dockerfile serves as a reference for how the app expects to run (ports, volumes, env vars, health checks), and we implement it the FreeBSD way.

For Bichon specifically, a multi-stage build is likely the way to go. We can use a Rust + pnpm build stage and copy the resulting binaries and static assets into our base image. It’s a great candidate because it’s self-contained and relies on environment variables for configuration.

Finally, our goal is to make these images a drop-in replacement for existing Linux containers. We intentionally map internal paths and config files to match exactly what users are used to on Linux, making the transition to FreeBSD completely transparent.
Next Steps & Documentation:

To give you a head start on how we structure things under the hood, we use a custom tool called dbuild. It's what we use to bootstrap our GitHub Actions and build all the images locally. This ensures the build process is exactly the same whether you're testing on your own machine or running it through our CI.

I've been putting together some documentation on how it works and our general workflow here:

• dbuild Guide
• Development Guide

I’m also working on a formal CONTRIBUTING.md right now that ties all of this together with specific templates for s6 service definitions and init scripts. I’m hoping to have it pushed in v1 later today.

Take a look at those guides when you have a minute, and I’ll reply back here as soon as the final CONTRIBUTING.md is pushed. Looking forward to seeing this in the lineup.

Also, happy to help if needed?

[ahze]

I added https://github.com/daemonless/daemonless/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md & updated a few docs on daemonless.io, which has been in the works for a little bit, just needed to finally get it cleaned up.

[Oxyaxion]

Hello thanks for the detailed answer.

So If I understand correctly we need to be able to build the app (if there is no pkg availabe) completely under FreeBSD first.
I'm not sur It will really help for some painfull app where somes js libraries cause problems during npm builds due to lack of compatibility with FreeBSD ... :(

[ahze]

I took a stab at bichon, it seems to atleast work on the webui side and logs look fine, but I don't really have a way to test IMAP.

You're right about the JS being a little bit of a pain in FreeBSD, the problem with bichon is it uses swc to compile the webfront end, and there aren't binaries for it in FreeBSD. Since it's output is static html/js, we can:

1. extract web/dist from the official container (they don't ship it, can't do this method)
2. Build on github actions linux then copy web/dist to FreeBSD VM
3. Compile web/dist on linux and copy...
4. Port swc to FreeBSD.

#4 is the best long term option. For the short term, I went with option 3 to just get the container up and going with the plan to move to option 2 (or maybe figure out if 1 is feasible, we already do something similar on immich-server...)

https://github.com/daemonless/bichon/

I won't be able to test it other than just looking at the web front end, can you test it ?