Emergency backup before FreeBSD port upgrade

I recently saw a blog post with some tips for dealing with the FreeBSD ports tree. The tip I thought was particularly useful regarding creating binary backups (_i.e._ packages) of important ports before upgrading them, just in case you need to roll back by installing the package.

pkg_create -b portname

will create a package for portname.

Otherwise if you’re using the portupgrade tool you can add the -b flag to create a package backup, i.e.

portupgrade -rRb portname

That should create a package in /usr/ports/packages/All/ (and do a recursive build in both directions).

The original blog post can be found at http://bsdpants.blogspot.com/2006/08/top-ten-rules-for-using-ports-system.html.

Whilst on the subject of good ideas when doing port upgrades, it’s often well worth running the command with a -n switch which prevents portupgrade from actually performing the upgrade, it just shows you what it would do - really useful if you want to see just how much stuff is going to be updated when you run the command for real! So normally I end up doing the following:

portupgrade -brRn <portname>
portupgrade -brR <portname>

Written on 26 Nov 2009 and categorised in FreeBSD, tagged as Ports, FreeBSD, Backup, and Portupgrade

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