It’s pretty straightforward but I can’t remember some of the commands like I can on Linux. So I’m creating a little post for it so I don’t have to keep searching and thinking what did I do last time every time.

Download the installation media

Head over to the download page to and download the memstick image that’s right for your architecture, in my case it’s the amd64 image.

Note: Make sure to verify the checksum, in order to do this you’ll need to download the checksum file. So, at this point I have the following 2 files.

CHECKSUM.SHA256-FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64
FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz

Extract the image

gunzip FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img.xz

Verify the checksum

openssl dgst -sha256 FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img

Compare the output of this with the values in the checksum file.

Write to a USB device

After plugging it in, find out where is it mounted using diskutil list. In my case it was mounted at disk2.

Unmount the usb: sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2

Finally writing the image!

sudo dd if=FreeBSD-11.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1m conv=sync

Once that’s complete you can eject the usb device.

sudo diskutil eject /dev/disk2

Now you can enjoy installing, setting up and using your new FreeBSD system.