FreeBSD: how to get rid of annoying option asking during port install

Posted on November 15th, 2011

As you may notice, sometimes you install package using ports you have been asking about some compile time options shown as dialog(1) window. That is not bad but when you need to do massive port installation or portupgrade many hundreds ports at once this can be a real pain. So, you want to trust default option set and forget about build-time-decision-making. All you need is one string in /etc/make.conf

BATCH=yes

Filed under FreeBSD | No Comments »

FreeBSD: How to set certain packages not to be updated with portupgrade

Posted on November 15th, 2011

Suppose you need some packages remain intact while updating other ones with portupgrade. Then you need to tell to do so via /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf

  HOLD_PKGS = [
    'bsdpan-*',
    'tomcat-*',
    'jdk-*',
    'javavmwrapper-*',
    'diablo-*',
  ]

Next time you run pkgtools you see that some packages are marked as “held”

# portversion -v | grep needs
...
diablo-jdk-1.6.0.07.02_16   <  [held] needs updating (port has 1.6.0.07.02_17) 
glib-2.28.8_1               <  needs updating (port has 2.28.8_2) 
gnutls-2.12.12              <  needs updating (port has 2.12.14) 
jdk-1.6.0.3p4_26            <  [held] needs updating (port has 1.6.0.3p4_27) 
...

Filed under FreeBSD | No Comments »

FreeBSD: How to install single port without installing complete ports tree

Posted on September 15th, 2011

For example you’ve got VPS server with limited disk space and you need to install something from ports collection but your do not want to hold all FreeBSD ports tree on disk. If so, you use porteasy to install only port you need.

# pkg_add -r porteasy
# export  CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.fr.FreeBSD.org:/home/ncvs
# cvs login
# porteasy -uv security/cyrus-sasl2-saslauthd

Filed under FreeBSD | No Comments »

How to clone ports from one FreeBSD installation to another

Posted on March 11th, 2011

First, get a list of installed ports

portmaster --list-origins > installed-port-list

On your target system, use that list as input to portmaster

portmaster -y --no-confirm `cat installed-port-list`

Filed under FreeBSD | No Comments »