LibreNMS has been a faithful companion for years now. It quietly handles the monitoring of my servers, devices, and services without demanding much in return - exactly what you want from a tool whose job is to watch over everything else. It's a solid alternative to heavier solutions like Zabbix, and it gives you alerts, data, and graphs on virtually anything reachable over SNMP.

I usually install it on a host that is not reachable from the outside, then let it poll all the devices through a VPN: a single observation point, clean perimeter. The ability to create multiple dashboards - and to filter them by user - has also let me give clients a transparent window onto their own servers. Transparency, in my experience, is always the better long-term bet.

Together with Uptime-Kuma (and the good old Nagios/Munin pair), LibreNMS lives in a FreeBSD jail on my monitoring servers and just does its job.

This post walks through a plain installation of LibreNMS on FreeBSD: package-based, no reverse proxy, no HTTPS, no fancy hardening. The goal is to get to a working setup you can build on top of.

Assumptions

• FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE, in a jail or on a dedicated VM/host
• nginx + php-fpm + MySQL 8.4
• LibreNMS installed from the official package — not via git clone

One note before we start: in this guide I use plain HTTP just to reach the first-time setup. If your LibreNMS instance won't stay confined to a private network or behind a VPN, configuring HTTPS is mandatory, not optional.

Installation

pkg install librenms mysql84-server python3 nginx

LibreNMS currently depends on PHP 8.4. If you want to speed PHP up, install OPcache too:

pkg install php84-opcache

MySQL

Two settings need to be in place before MySQL starts for the first time. After the first start they cannot be changed without reinitializing the data directory, so it's worth getting them right now.

cd /usr/local/etc/mysql
cp my.cnf.sample my.cnf

In the [mysqld] section, add:

innodb_file_per_table=1
lower_case_table_names=0

Now start MySQL:

service mysql-server enable
service mysql-server start

On a fresh FreeBSD install, the local root user can connect to MySQL without a password from the command line. Connect and create the database and user. I'm using password here as a placeholder - don't.

mysql

CREATE DATABASE librenms CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;
CREATE USER 'librenms'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON librenms.* TO 'librenms'@'localhost';
exit

php-fpm

Edit /usr/local/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf and adjust the listen directives:

listen = /var/run/php-fpm-librenms.sock
listen.owner = www
listen.group = www
listen.mode = 0660

Then create php.ini from the production sample:

cd /usr/local/etc
cp php.ini-production php.ini

And set the timezone in php.ini:

date.timezone = Europe/Rome

nginx

Since this jail (or host) is dedicated to LibreNMS, we can rewrite the server block in /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf directly:

server {
    listen      80;
    #server_name yourServerName
    root        /usr/local/www/librenms/html;
    index       index.php;

    charset utf-8;
    gzip on;
    gzip_types text/css application/javascript text/javascript application/x-javascript image/svg+xml text/plain text/xsd text/xsl text/xml image/x-icon;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location /api/v0 {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /api_v0.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.*)$;
        set $path_info $fastcgi_path_info;
        try_files $fastcgi_script_name =404;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE "";
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $path_info;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php-fpm-librenms.sock;
        fastcgi_buffers 256 4k;
        fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 14400;
    }

    location ~ /\.(?!well-known).* {
        deny all;
    }
}

Now start nginx and php-fpm:

service nginx enable
service nginx start

service php_fpm enable
service php_fpm start

LibreNMS configuration

Copy the default config:

cp /usr/local/www/librenms/config.php.default /usr/local/www/librenms/config.php

Because we installed from the package, this file already has the right commands and paths for FreeBSD - no need to hunt down mtr, fping, snmpwalk and friends one by one.

Create the directory for RRD graphs and set ownership:

mkdir -p /var/db/librenms/rrd
chown -R www:www /var/db/librenms
chmod 775 /var/db/librenms/rrd

Then the .env file:

cd /usr/local/www/librenms
cp .env.example .env
chown www .env

Edit .env and set at least:

• DB_DATABASE - librenms
• DB_USERNAME - librenms
• DB_PASSWORD - the one you actually used (not password, please)

Then add this line, which tells LibreNMS we still need to run the web installer:

INSTALL=true

A note on permissions. The official LibreNMS documentation suggests chown -R www:www over the entire application tree, but on FreeBSD the package already lays down sane ownership, with storage/ and bootstrap/cache/ writable by www. There's no reason to widen the rest of the codebase. If validate.php complains later about something write-related, the first place to check is:

ls -la /usr/local/www/librenms/storage /usr/local/www/librenms/bootstrap/cache

Now generate the app key as www, since the file is owned by www:

su -m www -c "php artisan key:generate"

And tighten .env:

chmod 600 .env

Refresh the configuration cache:

su -m www -c "lnms config:clear"
su -m www -c "lnms config:cache"

Web installer

Open http://host/install and follow the steps. The validation process may fail. Refreshing the cache picks up the values written to config.php during the install:

su -m www -c "lnms config:clear"
su -m www -c "lnms config:cache"

When the web installer is done, edit .env again and remove the INSTALL=true line if it's still there. Leaving it in place re-exposes the installer to anyone who can reach the URL.

Polling service

LibreNMS needs something to actually run the polls. On FreeBSD, the package ships an rc service that runs the LibreNMS dispatcher, so there's no need to manage cron entries by hand the way most Linux guides assume.

service librenms enable
service librenms start

Validate

cd /usr/local/www/librenms
su -m www -c './validate.php'

You may see a couple of complaints right after starting the service - usually scheduler-related and self-resolving within a few minutes. Re-run validate.php once the dispatcher has had time to settle. Anything still red after that is worth investigating.

Next steps

At this point you can log into the web interface and start adding devices, configuring SNMP, and building dashboards. For that, the official LibreNMS documentation is excellent, and there's no point in me paraphrasing it here.