The FreeBSD Ports collection is a

package management system A package manager or package-management system is a collection of software tools that automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing computer programs for a computer in a consistent manner. A package manager deals w ...

for the

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

, providing an easy and consistent way of installing software packages. As of February 2020, there are over 38,487 ports available in the collection. It has also been adopted by

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is ava ...

as the basis of its

pkgsrc pkgsrc (''package source'') is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 19 ...

system.

Installing from source

The

ports collection Ports collections (or ''ports trees'', or just ''ports'') are the sets of makefiles and patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. Th ...

uses

Makefile In software development, Make is a build automation tool that automatically builds executable programs and libraries from source code by reading files called ''Makefiles'' which specify how to derive the target program. Though integrated ...

s arranged in a directory hierarchy so that software can be built, installed and uninstalled with the make command. When installing an application, very little (if any) user intervention is required after issuing a beginning command such as make install or make install clean in the ports directory of the desired

application Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

. In most cases the software is automatically downloaded from the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...

, patched and configured if necessary, then

compiled In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...

, installed and registered in the package database. If the new port has needed dependencies on other applications or libraries, these are installed beforehand automatically. Most ports are already configured with default options which have been deemed generally appropriate for most users. However, these configuration options (called ''knobs'') can sometimes be changed before installation using the make config command, which brings up a text-based interface that allows the user to select the desired options. Historically, each port (or software package) has been maintained by an individual ''port maintainer'' who is responsible for ensuring the currency of the port and providing general support. Today, many ports are maintained by special task forces or sub-projects, each with a dedicated

mailing list A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is re ...

(e.g. kde@FreeBSD.org, java@FreeBSD.org, etc.), while unmaintained ports are assigned to the generic group ports@FreeBSD.org. In general, anyone may become a port maintainer by contributing their favorite software to the collection. One may also choose to maintain an existing port with no active maintainer.

Packages

Precompiled (binary) ports are called ''packages''. A package can be created from the corresponding port with the make package command; pre-built packages are also available for download from FreeBSD-hosted package repositories. A user can install a package by passing the package name to the pkg install command. This downloads the appropriate package for the installed FreeBSD release version, then installs the application, including any software dependencies it may have. By default, packages are downloaded from the main FreeBSD Package Repository (pkg.freebsd.org), but if there are any troubles after updating packages, previous version of packages cannot be installed because the repository denies subfolders indexes. In this case, a user must upgrade the OS version to the latest release and install latest packages. FreeBSD maintains a build farm called the ''pointyhat cluster'' in which all packages for all supported architectures and major releases are built. The build logs and known errors for all ports built into packages through the pointyhat cluster are available in a

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

and weekly builds logs are also available through mailing list archives. These pre-compiled packages are separated into categories by the architectures for which they are available. Packages are further separated into several "release" directories, one for each current ''production release'' built from the ports collection and shipped with the release. These production release directories are never updated. There are also ''stable'' and ''current'' directories for several major release branches. These are updated more or less weekly. In most cases a package created for an older version of FreeBSD can be installed and used on a newer system without difficulty since binary backward compatibility across major releases is enabled by default. A packaging system for binary packages called pkg has replaced the package management system in

10.

History

Jordan Hubbard Jordan K. Hubbard (born April 8, 1963) is an open source software developer, authoring software such as the Ardent Window Manager and various other open source tools and libraries before co-founding the FreeBSD project with Nate Williams and Rodne ...

committed his ''port make macros'' to the FreeBSD CVS repository on August 21, 1994. His package install suite ''Makefile'' had been committed a year earlier (August 26, 1993). The core ports framework was at first maintained by Hubbard along with Satoshi Asami for several years. The Ports Management Team was later formed to handle this task. NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's ports collection trace their roots to FreeBSD.

DPorts

Since release 3.6

DragonFly BSD DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8. Matthew Dillon, an Amiga developer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and FreeBSD developer between 1994 and 2003, began working on DragonFly BSD ...

project uses FreeBSD Ports as a base for its own ''DPorts'' ports collection. John Marino of DragonFly BSD project created ''DeltaPorts'' repository – a collection of patches and files that overlay and modify the FreeBSD Ports, in order to generate DPorts.

References

External links