bootstrap

The first step is to “bootstrap” a release. Current supported release is 11.2-RELEASE, but you can bootstrap anything in the ftp.FreeBSD.org RELEASES directory.

Note: your mileage may vary with unsupported releases and releases newer than the host system likely will NOT work at all.

To bootstrap a release, run the bootstrap sub-command with the release version as the argument.

ishmael ~ # bastille bootstrap 11.2-RELEASE
ishmael ~ # bastille bootstrap 12.0-RELEASE

This command will ensure the required directory structures are in place and download the requested release. For each requested release, bootstrap will download the base.txz and lib32.txz. These are both verified (sha256 via MANIFEST file) before they are extracted for use.

Downloaded artifacts are stored in the cache directory. “bootstrapped” releases are stored in releases/version.

The bootstrap subcommand is generally only used once to prepare the system. The only other use case for the bootstrap command is when a new FreeBSD version is released and you want to start building jails on that version.

To update a release as patches are made available, see the bastille update command.