Obfuscated Networking » Migrating ports

Obfuscated Networking is just a place to store ideas and thoughts. It's not clear what, why or how, but they are all here. Hopefully you will find them entertaining, thought provoking or interesting and will be inspired to leave your thoughts.

9/28/2007

Migrating ports

Filed under:

— Mike @ 11:18 am Edit This

So you’ve got a well used FreeBSD machine and you want to build a system that is similar in build. The question becomes how to handle ports. If your system is anything like mine you have a ton of ports installed. You can login to both systems and list packages on one and find then install the packages on the other. After the first four this gets annoying. Enter your pkg db.

# cd /var/db/pkg # find . -type f -exec grep ORIGIN {} \; | grep -v DEPORIGIN | awk -F: '{print $2}' > /tmp/ports

This gets the port directory for every port you’ve installed and makes a nice file like the following

lang/ruby18 devel/pkg-config print/freetype2

Move this file to the new server and use with the following

# for i in `cat /tmp/ports`; do cd /usr/ports/${i}; make install; done

This command is not what I’d call “robust” and does not handle errors in any meaningful way. The command will noisily fail on any already installed packages, which is as it should be, though it will build an installed but unbuilt package. You will find it attempting to install packages multiple times because some of your packages will be dependencies on others and it may install the dependency first.

Some day I hope to find a way to read the dependency information and build a tree that installs only the minimum needed packages.

9/28/2007

Migrating ports

278 Responses to “Migrating ports”