FreeBSD Ports Collection

1) http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports-using.html

The BSD Ports collection is a great tool for application management, usage is as below:

Updating/Installing the Ports collection:

Assuming BSD >= 6.1 RELEASE – for older versions see reference 1 above

Using portsnap for the first time:

cd /usr/ports
portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

Updating an existing ports collection:

cd /usr/ports
portsnap update

Browsing the ports collection:

Browsing the ports collection is really simple and straightforward – cd directory of course changes your current directory and ls displays a list of a directory’s contents. The ports collection is based in /usr/ports – the example below is for navigating to KDevelop (giving full directory listings in the process as you would typically do while browsing for a port to install. | less and q (used to escape less) can be omitted if you have enough screen realestate):

cd /usr/ports
ls | less
q
cd devel
ls | less
q
cd kdevelop

Building/Installing/Uninstalling/Reinstalling/Cleaning a port:

Assuming you have already navigated to the directory of the desired port in /usr/ports

To build a port (sometimes preferred if there is a risk of a failure or if you aren’t too lazy to add the extra word after it in a separate command):

make

To install a port:

make install

To remove a port:

make deinstall

To reinstall a port:

make reinstall

To clean a distfile directory (good to do if you care about disk space and almost always required before doing a reinstall):

make clean

Simple eh? Ports are by far my most liked feature contained in BSD aside from security

One thing worth noting is that there are more advanced features with ports, which are better documented in reference 1 above (this page is meant to be a quick reference only) – however this should work if your just installing to default directories from a host machine or within a jail via ssh.