I have been learning FreeCAD for close to 2 years now, and finally took time today to figure out how to make it portable.
You can download the official installer and extract the files, but I would strongly encourage you to use the
RealThunder branch of FreeCAD, It is available as a 7-Zip package, so it is more convenient. Plus it is much further along in fixing the
topological naming problem, which is really great. Trust me, it is going to be one of the first problems you encounter when you try to design anything slightly complex using the official version.
Basically, your model is made up of a list of chronological operations. When you go back and make changes to something earlier in the list, there is a high chance you will mess up the later operations under the officail version. There are workarounds for this (eg. using datum planes), but IMHO they are very tedious and cumbersome to use. Under the RealThunder branch, you are much less likely to encounter this issue.
Anyway, after you have extracted the files, the EXE is
bin\FreeCAD.exe (or
bin\FreeCADLink.exe for the RealThunder branch). Now create a subfolder called
userdata in the main folder. Also create a .bat file in the main folder called
freecad.bat with the following content:
Code: Select all
@cd "%~dp0"
@set FREECAD_USER_HOME="%~dp0\userdata"
@start "FreeCad" "%~dp0\bin\FreeCAD.exe" --single-instance "%1"
Now when you can start FreeCAD by running this batch file (and even pass
.fcstd file to launch). All temp files and config info will be saved to the
userdata subfolder.
Also check out
this post, where I discuss how to create a file association for
.fcstd files and this wrapper
freecad.bat that we have just created.