FreeBSD Packages

• FreeBSD
• FreeBSD Ports
• pkg_add
• pkg_upgrade

• Package Lists
• FreeBSD Ports

A few notes regarding ports (source installs) and packages (binary installs):

• The versions may be different from each other (PHP 5.3.15 in ports, PHP 5.3.14 in packages)
• You can mix and match between the two (one source install, one binary), but it is not recommended
• FreeBSD by default will install packages that were built for the original release
• You must set PACKAGESITE environment variable yourself to get latest packages

csh:

echo setenv PACKAGESITE ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-9.0-stable/ >> ~/.cshrc
source ~/.cshrc

bash:

echo PACKAGESITE=ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-9.0-stable/ >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now you're ready to install system packages. The first thing to do is install bsdadminscripts which will make managing packages much simpler.

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/bsdadminscripts
make clean install

The bsdadminsciripts package gets the package information directly from an FTP server, instead of relying on the data in ports. It also comes with a script pkg_upgrade which makes installation and upgrading much simpler.

Install some basics to get started:

pkg_upgrade -r `fetch -q -o - http://beandog.org/downloads/freebsd/packages/base`
chsh -s /usr/local/bin/bash

Upgrade FreeBSD to use devel/pkgconf instead of devel/pkg-config:

pkg_upgrade -r portmaster
portmaster -o devel/pkgconf devel/pkg-config

List installed packages:

pkg_info

Download package list for parsing:

curl -s http://beandog.org/downloads/freebsd/packages/apache | cut -d "/" -f 2

Install a package using the shortname, fex wget. This will pull in all dependencies as well.

pkg_add -r wget