This a short set of notes from my experience making my first pfSense package.
This sort of thing is not my forte so there might be a better way to do certain parts and there certainly many different ways.
https://www.freebsd.org/where.html
I used the version of FreeBSD that matched the base version that I was developing for, as well as the architecture, and used the disc option. I'm sure you have leeway here.
The name of the image name I used: FreeBSD-10.3-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso
During installation, you can unselect the option to install the ports tree since it will be cloned from the pfSense repo later on.
At the end of the install process choose the option to enter into shell and enable root access over ssh:
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
find #PermitRootLogin no
and change to: PermitRootLogin yes
reboot, ssh in, and choose Option 8 to enter the shell.
then pkg install git to install git
then cd /usr/
then git clone https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-ports.git to clone the pfSense ports repo
then mv FreeBSD-ports ports
I just like to treat this as a build server and not commit to git directly from it.
For my use case I copied a previous package I had helped work on as it was similar to my new one.
run make package from inside the directory of the package you are making.
If you need to clean things up before running it again for whatever reason, run make clean.
Once that has completed successfully, there should be a .txz file in that directory that you can scp to the home directory of your pfSense instance.
ssh into our pfSense box and run pkg install <the_name_of_your_built_package.txz>
Before submitting your package you need to intall run portlint on your build server.
run pkg install portlint.
run echo DEVELOPER=yes >> /etc/make.conf.
cd into your package directory.
run portlint -CN and fix any errors.
congrats!
@jdillard This is great help! Could you expand on the "Making your package" section?