pkg - a binary package manager for FreeBSD

Known to fully work on (official package manager):

• FreeBSD
• DragonflyBSD

Known to work on (has been ported to):

• Linux
• NetBSD/EdgeBSD
• OSX

Table of Contents:

• libpkg
• pkg package format
• Local Database
• Installing packages
• Upgrading packages
• Deleting packages
• Installing pkg
• pkg bootstrap
• pkg in Ports
• Building pkg using sources from Git
• A quick usage introduction to pkg
• Getting help on the commands usage
• Querying the local package database
• Installing packages
• Adding pkg tarballs directly
• Working with a remote package repository
• Working with multiple remote package repositories
• Updating remote repositories
• Searching in remote package repositories
• Installing from remote repositories
• Backing up your package database
• Creating a package repository
• Additional resources

Cirrus CI: (Linux, OSX, FreeBSD):

libpkg

pkg is built on top of libpkg, a new library to interface with package registration backends. It abstracts package management details such as registration, remote repositories, package creation, updating, etc.

pkg package format

pkg package format is a tar archive which can be raw, or use the following compression: gz, bzip2 and xz, defaulting in xz format.

The tar itself is composed in two types of elements:

• the special files at the beginning of the archive, starting with a "+"
• the data.

The metadata

pkg uses several files for metadata:

• +COMPACT_MANIFEST
• +MANIFEST

COMPACT_MANIFEST

This is a subset of the information included in the main MANIFEST, omitting the lists of files, checksums, directories and scripts. It contains the information used to build the repository catalogue.

MANIFEST

The manifest is in UCL format, it contains all the information about the package:

name: foo
version: 1.0
origin: category/foo
comment: this is foo package
arch: i386
www: http://www.foo.org
maintainer: [email protected]
prefix: /usr/local
licenselogic: or
licenses: [MIT, MPL]
flatsize: 482120
users: [USER1, USER2]
groups: [GROUP1, GROUP2]
options: { OPT1: off, OPT2: on }
desc: <
Valid scripts are:


pre-install
post-install
install
pre-deinstall
post-deinstall
deinstall
pre-upgrade
post-upgrade
upgrade


Script MUST be in sh format.
Nothing else will work.
The shebang is not required.

When the manifest is read by pkg_create files and dirs can use an
alternate format:
files: {
  /usr/local/bin/foo: 'sha256sum',
  /usr/local/bin/bar: {sum: 'sha256sum', uname: baruser, gname: foogroup, perm: 0644 }
}
directories: {
  /usr/local/share/foo-1.0: 'y',
  /path/to/directory: {uname: foouser, gname: foogroup, perm: 0755}
}

This allows overriding the users, groups and mode of files and
directories during package creation.
So, for example, this allows to creation of a package containing
root-owned files without being packaged by the root user.



Local database

When a package is installed, it is registered in a SQLite database.

The SQLite database allow fast queries and ACID transactions.  It also
allows finding the reverse dependencies reliably without a needing the
+REQUIRED_BY hack.

In order to save space the MTREE is only stored once, which save 18K per
installed package.

pkg supports a 
register
 command to register packages into the SQLite
database from the ports. The register command can execute the install script,
show pkg-message, ...



Installing packages


pkg add
 can install a package archive from the local disk, or from a
remote FTP/HTTP server.

If only a package name is given, it will search the repository catalogues
and download and install the package if it exists. Any dependencies will be
downloaded and installed first.

This is possible because we have the dependency information in the
catalogue of the remote repository.


pkg add
 will check if the user attempts to install a package built
for another arch or release.



Upgrading packages

pkg also supports upgrades of binary packages.

pkg will compare the versions of installed packages and those available in
the repository. It will compute the proper update order and apply them.



Deleting packages


pkg delete
 will remove a package, and (depending on the command line
arguments) any other packages that depend on what you're trying to
delete.

Directory leftovers are automatically removed if they are empty and
not in the MTREE.



Installing pkg

There are three ways to install pkg: two for general day-to-day use,
and the third if you want to help with pkg development.



Pkg bootstrap

All supported versions of FreeBSD now contain /usr/sbin/pkg a.k.a
pkg(7).  This is a small placeholder that has just the minimum
functionality required to install the real pkg(8).

To use, simply run any pkg(8) command line.  pkg(7) will intercept the
command, and if you confirm that is your intention, download the
pkg(8) tarball, install pkg(8) from it, bootstrap the local package
database and then proceed to run the command you originally requested.

More recent versions of pkg(7) understand 
pkg -N
 as a test to see if
pkg(8) is installed without triggering the installation, and
conversely, 
pkg bootstrap[-f]
 to install pkg(8) (or force it to be
reinstalled) without performing any other actions.



pkg in Ports

pkg-1.0 release was committed to the the ports tree on 30th August
2012, and a series of further releases are planned.  To install the
latest release version:
$ make -C /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg install clean
$ echo "WITH_PKG=yes" >> /etc/make.conf



Building pkg using sources from Git [FreeBSD]

In order to build pkg from source, you will need to have Gnu
autotools and some other tools installed.
# pkg install autoconf automake libtool pkgconf

The next thing to do is to get the pkg sources installed on your machine.
You can grab a development snapshot of pkg from the pkg GitHub repository

To get the latest version of pkg from the Git repo, just clone it:
% git clone https://github.com/freebsd/pkg

or
% git clone [email protected]:freebsd/pkg.git

Or you can take an already tagged release of pkg from the above web
page as well.
Just open your browser and download the release you want.

Once you have the pkg sources, installing it is fairly easy:
% cd pkg
% ./configure
% make
# make install

Now you should have the latest pkg installed on your system.  Note
that this build and install procedure does not update the local
package database at all, so you will get some odd effects due to the
packaging system being misled into thinking an older version of pkg is
installed.

Note: if you're running anything other than FreeBSD or DragonFly, you
will need to do some porting work.  The pkg(8) codebase should be
reasonably portable onto anything with a c99 compiler, POSIX compliant
system and capable of running Gnu autotools.  However, various places
in the pkg(8) code make assumptions about OS specific behaviour.  If
you do try anything like this, we'd be very interested to hear how you
get on.



A quick usage introduction to pkg

In this section of the document we will try to give a quick and dirty
introduction on the practical usage of pkg - installing packages,
searching in remote package repositories, updating remote package
repositories and installing from them, etc.



Getting help on the commands usage

In order to get help on any of the pkg commands you should use the 
pkg help 
command, which will take the man page of the specified command.

In order to get the available commands in pkg, just execute 
pkg help
# pkg help
# pkg help 



Querying the local package database

In order to get information about installed packages use the 
pkg
info
 command.


pkg info
 will query the local package database and display
information about the package you are interested in.

To list all install/registered packages in the local database, use
this command:
# pkg info -a

For more information on querying the local package database, please
refer to pkg-info(1) man page.



Installing packages

Packages are installed either from a repository, from the results of a
local compilation of software via the ports or from a pkg tarball
independently obtained from some other source.

A repository is a collection of packages which have been gathered
together, had a catalogue created and then published, typically by
exposing the repository via HTTP or some other networking protocol.
You can also publish a repository from a local or NFS mounted
filesystem (using file:// style URLs) or via SSH (using ssh:// URLs.)



Adding pkg tarballs directly

In order to install the package foo-1.2.3 from a local pkg tarball,
use a command similar to the following:
# pkg add /path/to/packages/foo-1.2.3.txz

You will need to make sure that all dependencies of foo-1.2.3 are
either also available as tarballs in the same directory, or previously
installed by other means.

You can also install the package foo-1.2.3 tarball from a remote
location using the FTP/HTTP protocol. In order to do that you could
use a command similar to the following:
# pkg add http://example.org/pkg-repo/foo-1.2.3.txz

Which works in exactly the same way, except that it fetches the
package tarballs using the protocol indicated by the URL.

For more information on installing packages on your FreeBSD system,
please refer to pkg-add(1)



Working with a remote package repository

While pkg(8) can deal with individual package tarballs, the real power
comes from the use of repositories, which publish a 'catalogue' of
meta-data about the packages they contain.

You can configure pkg(8) to use one or several repositories.
Supported versions of FreeBSD now contain a default configuration out
of the box: 
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf
 which is setup to install packages
from the official package repositories.

To add additional repositories, create a per-repository configuration
file in 
/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos
 -- it doesn't matter what the
filename is other than it must match '*.conf' and you should add a
'priority' setting indicating the preference order.  This is just an
integer, where higher values indicate the more preferred repositories.
Priority defaults to 0 unless explicitly stated.  This is the value
for the default 
/etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

To disable the default FreeBSD.conf, create a file

/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
 with the contents:
FreeBSD: { enabled: no }

To check quickly what repositories you have configured, run 
pkg -vv
.

See pkg.conf(5) for details of the format of 
pkg.conf
 and the
per-repository 
repo.conf
 files.  See pkg-repository(5) for more
details about package repositories and how to work with them.

Note that the old style of setting PACKAGESITE in pkg.conf is
no-longer supported.  Setting PACKAGESITE in the environment has
meaning for the pkg(7) shim, but is ignored by pkg(8).



Updating from remote repositories

Then fetch the repository catalogues using the command:
# pkg update

For more information on updating from remote repositories, please
refer to pkg-update(1).

This will fetch the remote package database to your local system. Now
in order to install packages from the remote repository, you can use
the 
pkg install
 command:
# pkg install zsh cfengine3



Working with multiple repositories

If you have more than one repository defined, then you probably want
to install some packages from a specific repository, but allow others
to be obtained from whatever repository has them available.

You can install a package from a specific repository:
    # pkg install -r myrepo zsh

where 
myrepo
 is one of the tags shown in the 
pkg -vv
 output.
pkg(8) will automatically create an annotation showing which
repository a package came from, similarly to the effect of running:
    # pkg annotate -A pkgname repository myrepo

pkg(8) will attempt to use the same repository for any updates to this
package, even if there are more recent versions available from other
repositories.  This is usually the desired behaviour.  Otherwise see
the documentation for 
CONSERVATIVE_UPGRADE
 in pkg.conf(5).



Searching in remote package repositories

You can search in the remote package repositories using the 
pkg
search
 command.

If you have multiple repositories configured, 
pkg search
 will return
results from searching each of them.  Use the 
-r reponame
 option to
confine your search to a specific repository.

An example search for a package could be done like this:
# pkg search -x apache

For more information on the repositories search, please refer to
pkg-search(1)



Installing from remote repositories

pkg(8) will install a package from the highest priority repository
that contains the package and that allows the solver to satisfy the
package dependencies.  This may entail reinstalling existing packages
from a different repository.

The process continues until the package is fetched and installed, or
all remote repositories fail to fetch the package.

Remote installations of packages using pkg are done by the 
pkg
install
 command.

Here's an example installation of few packages:
# pkg install www/apache22
# pkg install zsh
# pkg install perl5-5.18.2_4

Or you could also install the packages using only one command, like this:
# pkg install www/apache22 zsh perl5-5.18.2_4

For more information on the remote package installs, please refer to
pkg-install(1)



Backing up your package database

It is a good idea that you backup your local package database on regular basis.

In order to backup the local package database, you should use the 
pkg backup
 command.
# pkg backup -d /path/to/pkg-backup.dump

The above command will create a dump of your local package database in
/path/to/pkg-backup.dump

For more information on backing up your local package database, please
refer to pkg-backup(1)



Creating a package repository

You can also use pkg, so that you create a package repository.

In order to create a package repository you need to use the 
pkg
create
 command.

Here's an example that will create a repository of all your currently
installed packages:
# cd /path/with/enough/space
# pkg create -a
# pkg repo .

The above commands will create a repository of all packages on your system.

Now you can share your repo with other people by letting them know of
your repository :)



Additional resources


The Git repository of pkg is hosted on GitHub
The pkg Wiki page
Jenkins instance for pkg


In order to get in contact with us, you can find us in the

[email protected] IRC channel.

If you hit a bug when using pkg, you can always submit an issue in the
pkg issue tracker.