The "ports collection" is one of FreeBSD's most powerful selling points. It consists of a framework for easily installation of many programs (over 9,000 as of 2003-09-01), ranging from non-English text editors, to scientific applications, to web servers.

To use the ports collection, a SystemAdministrator^? visits the /usr/ports directory, and sees many top-level classes of programs. Some examples are:

archivers
astro
audio
benchmarks
biology
cad
chinese
comms
converters

Then, {s,}he changes into the appropriate category for the software package they wish to install, and changes again into the subdirectory for the desired program. For example, the "port" for Bash lies in /usr/ports/shells/bash2.

From there, simply typing make install will:

• Download the program's source code
• Apply any FreeBSD-specific patches
• Compile with the custom optizations given in /etc/make.conf
• Install the program and related documentation

If the program requires other programs to compile or run correctly, then they will be recursively installed before compilation begins.

Alternatively, you can use the PortInstall^? and PortUpgrade tools to automate much of the drudgery of configuring and updating your ports.

-- TWikiGuest - 08 Sep 2003