OpenBSD ports mechanism

History

OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there is a lot of software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where to draw the line as to what to include, as well as the occasional licensing and export restriction problems. In what is supposed to be small stand-alone unix-like operating system, some things just can't be shipped with the system. We wanted to find a way for users to easily get software we don't provide and started to look around. We didn't have to look far as a sibling project, FreeBSD, had an excellent mechanism for exactly this purpose called "The ports collection". At first we tried to use their collection as-is, but due to incompatibility problems between FreeBSD and OpenBSD we decided to branch out and create our very own OpenBSD Ports Project using FreeBSD's as a starting point. This also allows us to tune the ports better to our system.

Short description and setup

The ports idea is to have, for each piece of software, a Makefile that

Describes where to fetch it,
How to do the fetch,
What it is depending upon (if anything),
how to alter the sources (if needed),
and how to configure, build and install it.

Normally this information is kept in an hierarchy under /usr/ports (however, this is configurable).

We recommend reading the ports chapter in the FreeBSD handbook to get information on how to setup this hierarchy until OpenBSD can complete its own ports.helpfile

Getting the Ports tree

The ports source tree is available in several ways:

You can ftp the 2.2 version of it from the pub/OpenBSD/2.2 directory on any of the ftp mirror sites.
You can use AnonCVS to get the most recent version of it, using essentially "cvs get ports".

(Note: the version of the ports tree on the 2.2 CDROM is not the most recent version. You likely want to get and use a newer version).

Example use of the Ports tree

Let's say you managed to get a ports tree sitting under /usr/ports, then you should be able to something like this:

% cd /usr/ports/archivers/unzip
% make
% su
# make install
# exit

Easy, huh?

Getting ports easily

An easy way of getting the ports (at least for now) is by ftp, in pub/OpenBSD/snapshots/ports.tar.gz. It is updated every night.

Problems and contacts

Our ports coordinator is currently working on a ports status page.

If you have trouble with ports contact Ejovi Nuwere (preferably), Gene Skonicki, or Todd Tyrone Fries.

Please provide either patches or enough details for repair, if you cannot do this, point us at the problematic port and tell us what fails and we shall try to fix it.

www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: ports.html,v 1.16 1997/12/09 05:37:01 joey Exp $