A few months ago Travis wrote a great post on installing MacPorts. If you’ve never heard of MacPorts:
The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.
MacPorts makes it extremely easy to find and install tools.
As an example, let’s install wget.
First, we search by typing
port search wget
We can see here there are 3 packages that match wget. We want the one named wget in net/wget.
Let’s find out some more information before we install:
port info wget
We get the following package information:
wget 1.11.2, net/wget (Variants: universal, no_ssl)
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.
Library Dependencies: openssl, gettext
Platforms: darwin freebsd
Now to install we type:
sudo port install wget
You should see something like the output below. Ports will automatically install every dependency so your install times will vary.
Additional Commands
Update
sudo port update wget
Uninstall
sudo port uninstall wget
Update Packages: Retrieves the latest package information
sudo port selfupdate
Installed Packages: A current list of installed packages
sudo port installed
MacPorts are Great
Note: You should always exercise caution when using the sudo command. You can mess up your system if you don’t know what you’re doing.
MacPorts is a great solution for installing common Mac applications and utilities. It’s much more efficient and works quite well. One downside is MacPorts doesn’t have as extensive collection as say FreeBSD Ports, so there are some holes.
Also, the ports are often a release or two behind (Firefox is at 2.0)–so don’t expect the latest version for many of these packages. For the most part these are known stable releases.
If you’re not comfortable with the terminal, there is a GUI solution Porticus. I haven’t tried it, so I would use at your own risk.
What are your favorite MacPorts packages?
Mine are wget and lynx.
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