Support FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD

[cwross]

Problem

Installer script does not run on FreeBSD.
ERROR: there isn't a download for your platform x86_64-unknown-freebsd

Proposed solution

Support for the *BSDs would be most welcome. PostgreSQL is well supported on the *BSDs, so Mathesar would be super helpful to have. FreeBSD being the most popular and most heavily used in enterprise would probably be the best target if only one platform can be targeted, but I'd be thrilled to see some love for OpenBSD, too.

[pavish]

@cwross We do not have plans for supporting FreeBSD in our install script, at the moment. While we discuss internally, here are some things you could try.

I'm not sure about the current state of Docker support for FreeBSD. If you manage to get it working, you could use our Docker based installation method.

If not, you could still attempt to install Mathesar with a few manual steps. The steps are mostly POSIX compliant, however, you'd probably have to debug and adapt them to get them working.

Once you have the Mathesar internal db configured in Postgresql as per our docs, you could do the following:

1. Create required directories. Your user should own these directory.

   mkdir -p mathesar mathesar/.media
   

2. Download the release package from the following link for the latest release (0.7.0 - at the moment of writing this comment):

   https://github.com/mathesar-foundation/mathesar/releases/download/0.7.0/mathesar.tar.gz
   

3. Extract the downloaded package into the installation directory.

   tar -xzf mathesar.tar.gz -C mathesar
   

4. Install python packages. (You may also have to install cairo, based on your environment)

   # Move into the install directory 
   cd mathesar
   
   # Activate venv
   python3 -m venv ./mathesar-venv
   source ./mathesar-venv/bin/activate
   
   # Install packages
   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Setup environment variables, in a .env file. Read our docs to configure the env variables. Here's how an example .env file looks like:

   SECRET_KEY="RANDOM_LONG_RANDOM_STRING_WHICH_IS_ATLEAST_50_CHARS"
   ALLOWED_HOSTS="localhost"
   POSTGRES_DB="mathesar_django"
   POSTGRES_USER="mathesar"
   POSTGRES_PASSWORD="REPLACE_WITH_DB_PASSWORD"
   POSTGRES_HOST="localhost"
   POSTGRES_PORT="5432"
   

6. Export variables to the shell:

   set -a
   source .env
   set +a
   

7. Run migrations:

    ./mathesar-venv/bin/python -m mathesar.install
   

8. Run Mathesar:

   ./mathesar-venv/bin/gunicorn config.wsgi -b "0.0.0.0:8000"
   

You could setup Mathesar as a service by following our Deployment instructions. Please note that these depend on systemd, you may have to modify it to use the BSD init system.

Please keep us updated with your progress and findings, if you decide to give this a try.