This repository contains example Dockerfiles that can be used to create containers that have all the required dependencies pre-installed that are needed to build FreeCAD from source. Optional dependencies are not included.

You can use podman or docker interchangeably to build and run the containers.

The following distributions are supported, and were tested against the FreeCAD 1.1 release branch:

• Arch Linux (archlinux:base-20260405.0.511327)
• Debian Trixie (debian:13)
• Ubuntu 25.10 (ubuntu:25.10)
• Fedora 43 (fedora:43)

First, set an environment variable according to the distribution you want to use, as well as your FreeCAD source directory

export DISTR=<arch,debian,ubuntu,fedora>
export FC_SOURCE=<path to your FreeCAD source directory>

Then, create the build environment:

podman build --file Dockerfile.$DISTR --tag freecad-$DISTR

Run the image, mounting both the source and build directories:

podman run --rm --interactive --tty --volume $FC_SOURCE/builds:/builds:z --volume $FC_SOURCE:/fc freecad-$DISTR

Once inside the container, you can build FreeCAD:

cmake -S /fc -B fc-build -GNinja
cmake --build fc-build -j$(nproc --ignore=2)