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Building canals is part of world history, but it just dawned on me, I don't know how to build a canal in our favorite game. Is it possible? If so, how?

Think of all the canals, there's a major network in Europe, the one connecting the Rhine and the Danube, there's several connecting the three major rivers in France, more in the UK. I think you can get from the Bay of Biscay to the Black Sea or the Baltic Sea using only rivers and canals. Then the American canals, starting with the Erie canal (did you know that George Washington was an investor in the canal along the Potomac river?) The Chinese also built canals. Then there's the two world changing canals, the Suez and the Panama. And we can't forget about the Kiel canal.

I have built a canal (indirectly) via building a city on an ithmus of land. If the ithmus is just one unit of land wide, built a city. This naval forces can enter the city from one sea, pass through the city, and go out into the other sea.

However, I'd like to build canals between rivers, the way the French and Germans did it.

No supplied ruleset has canal, but variant2 ruleset (for freeciv-2.6 and up) has.

Thanks, this gives me a reason to download 2.6beta and try out different rulesets,

Also, if minimum distance between cities is 1, you can set an array of cities to be used as a channel.

Or alternately you can transform: forest -> swamp -> ocean. Might be a bigger canal than you were hoping for, though.

I'm thinking of adding a canal "road" to the Big ruleset I'm working on, maybe with Engineering as the requisite technology. It shouldn't be terribly hard to do actually.

With existing rules, canal can be done by using engineers. Bridges can be arranged using cities or pass on diagonal sea tiles.
Once canal was finished, I sealed it again with engineers on ship, and placed town here, thus my ships can go trough, enemy not: