pkgsrc: The NetBSD Packages Collection

The following mailing lists may be of interest to pkgsrc users:

pkgsrc provides the following key features:

pkgsrc consists of both a Source distribution and a Binary distribution for these operating systems. After retrieving the required source or binaries, you can be up and running with pkgsrc in just minutes!

If you are using NetBSD, you can get started with pkgsrc right away. Skip ahead to Installing packages.

We provide a bootstrap kit in both source and binary form for other platforms, consisting of the pkg administration tools and other tools required to use pkgsrc and build packages.

Simply download the binary kit for your platform, and extract it into / e.g.

# cd /
# gzip -c -d /tmp/bootstrap-pkgsrc-SunOS-5.9-sparc-20031023.tar.gz \
  | tar -xpf -

Of course, as with any binary distributions, you should verify the checksum against the SUM or CKSUM file and inspect the contents before extracting it.

You can download the pkgsrc tarball (updated weekly) or checkout the latest sources using AnonCVS:

# cvs checkout -P pkgsrc

(for setting up AnonCVS, see Tracking NetBSD-current).

After downloading and/or extracting the sources, installing the bootstrap kit should be as simple as:

# cd pkgsrc/bootstrap
# ./bootstrap

This will use the defaults of /usr/pkg for the prefix and /var/db/pkg for the package database directory. However, these can also be set using command-line parameters (use ./bootstrap --help to see the available options).

Note that when using pkgsrc on a non-NetBSD system, use the bmake command instead of “make” to run the NetBSD make, which is required for correct pkgsrc operation. Simply substitute “bmake” for “make” in pkgsrc documentation.

A selection of precompiled binary packages for NetBSD 1.6.x and 2.0.x is available from /pub/NetBSD/packages on NetBSD FTP sites.

The majority of users will find the browsable web listing most useful.

Packages can be installed either by downloading a package and its prerequisites to a local disk and running:

# pkg_add <package>

or directly by specifying the full URL as in:

# pkg_add ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/<os_release>/<arch>/<type>/<package>

Prerequisites will be automatically retrieved and installed if they are available in the same remote directory.

Packages are installed by default into /usr/pkg. You should ensure that /usr/pkg/bin and /usr/pkg/sbin are in your PATH variable (best set in /etc/csh.cshrc).

The NetBSD Packages Collection consists of a set of Makefiles, brief descriptions, and any patches needed to ensure easy compilation of third-party programs.

Installing pkgsrc will allow you to easily compile and install any of the software contained in the collection.

There are several methods for obtaining pkgsrc, including AnonCVS and FTP. More details can be found in the full pkgsrc documentation.

After obtaining pkgsrc, the /usr/pkgsrc directory now contains a set of packages, organized into categories. You can browse the online index of packages, or run make readme from the /usr/pkgsrc directory to build local README.html files for all packages, viewable with any web browser such as www/lynx or www/mozilla.

The default prefix for installed packages is /usr/pkg. If you wish to change this, you should do so by setting LOCALBASE in /etc/mk.conf (What is /etc/mk.conf?). You should not try to use multiple different LOCALBASE definitions on the same system (inside a chroot is an exception).

/etc/mk.conf can be used to define certain variables for the package system. It is not present by default, but can be created when needed. Among the many values which can be set are:

Also, pkgsrc/mk/bsd.pkg.defaults.mk gives the defaults which are used in pkgsrc. This file can be used as a guide to set values in /etc/mk.conf - it is only necessary to set values where they differ from the defaults.

The NetBSD Security-Officer and Packages Groups maintain a list of known security vulnerabilities to packages which are (or have been) included in pkgsrc. The list is available from the NetBSD FTP site at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/distfiles/vulnerabilities.

Through security/audit-packages, this list can be downloaded automatically, and a security audit of all packages installed on a system can take place.

There are two components to security/audit-packages. The first component, “download-vulnerability-list”, is for downloading the list of vulnerabilities from the NetBSD FTP site. The second component, “audit-packages”, checks to see if any of your installed packages are vulnerable. If a package is vulnerable, you will see output similar to the following:

Package samba-2.0.9 has a local-root-shell vulnerability, see
http://www.samba.org/samba/whatsnew/macroexploit.html

One can set up security/audit-packages to download the vulnerabilities file daily, and include a package audit in the daily security script. Details on this are located in the MESSAGE file for security/audit-packages.

Install pkgtools/pkglint and run lintpkgsrc with the “-i” argument to check if your packages are up-to-date, e.g.

% lintpkgsrc -i
...
Version mismatch: 'tcsh' 6.09.00 vs 6.10.00

You can then use make update to update the package on your system and rebuild any dependencies.

Other useful command to use with the NetBSD Package Collection are shown below.

There are a number of additional tools in pkgsrc that provide additional features for maintaining a pkgsrc system. See the Utilities for package management (pkgtools) section of the pkgsrc guide for a list.