port(1) Manual Page

Verbose mode, generates verbose messages

Debug mode, generate debugging messages, implies -v

Quiet mode, suppress informational messages to a minimum, implies -N

Non-interactive mode, interactive questions are not asked

Don’t follow dependencies in upgrade (affects upgrade and install)

Also upgrade dependents (only for upgrade)

Uninstall inactive ports when upgrading and uninstalling

Perform a dry run. All of the steps to build the ports and their dependencies are computed, but not actually performed. With the verbose flag, every step is reported; otherwise there is just one message per port, which allows you to easily determine the recursive deps of a port (and the order in which they will be built).

Source-only mode, build and install from source; do not attempt to fetch binary archives.

Binary-only mode, build and install from binary archives, ignore source, abort if no archive available.

Autoclean mode, execute clean after install

Keep mode, do not autoclean after install

Despite any errors encountered, proceed to process multiple ports and commands.

Honor state files even if the Portfile was modified. This flag is called -o because it used to mean "older".

Enable trace mode debug facilities on platforms that support it, currently only macOS.
This feature is two-folded. It consists in automatically detecting and reporting undeclared dependencies based on what files the port reads or what programs the port executes. In verbose mode, it will also report unused dependencies for each stage of the port installation. It also consists in forbidding and reporting file creation and file writes outside allowed directories (temporary directories and ${workpath}).

Force mode, ignore state file

Specify a directory to which the port command should change before processing any actions. If the specified value does not contain any slashes, the value is used to look up a port and the current working directory is set to the corresponding port directory.

Read and process the file of commands specified by the argument. If the argument is -, then read commands from stdin. If the option is given multiple times, then multiple files will be read.

Search for an available port whose name or description matches a regular expression.

port search vim

Displays meta-information available for portname. Specific meta-information may be requested through an option such as --maintainer or --category. Recognized field names are those from the PortIndex, see “port help info” for a complete list. If no specific fields are specified, a useful default collection of fields will be displayed. If the global option -q is in effect, the meta-info fields will not be labeled. If the option --line is provided, all such data will be consolidated into a single line per port, suitable for processing in a pipe of commands. If the option --pretty is provided, the information will be formatted in a somewhat more attractive fashion for human readers. This is the default when no options at all are specified to info. If the option --index is provided, the information will be pulled from the PortIndex rather than from the Portfile. In this case variant information, such as dependencies, will not affect the output.

port info vim +ruby
port info --category --name apache*
port -q info --category --name --version category:java
port info --line --category --name all
port info --pretty --fullname --depends gtk2
port info --index python27

Displays notes for portname which usually contain useful information concerning setup and use of the port.

Lists the variants available for portname.

Lists the other ports that are required to build and run portname. This is simply an alias for “info --pretty --fullname --depends”.

Recursively lists the other ports that are required to build and run portname. To display the full dependency tree instead of only showing each port once, use --full. To take dependency information from the PortIndex instead of the Portfile (faster, but does not take variant selections into account), use --index. To exclude dependencies that are only needed at build time (i.e. depends_fetch, depends_extract, depends_build), use --no-build.

Lists the installed ports that depend on the port portname.

Recursively lists the installed ports that depend on the port portname. To display the full tree of dependents instead of only showing each port once, use --full.

Install and activate portname.

Deactivate and uninstall portname. To uninstall all installed but inactive ports, use -u. To recursively uninstall all dependents of this port, use --follow-dependents. To uninstall portname and then recursively uninstall all ports it depended on, use --follow-dependencies. This will not uninstall dependencies that are marked as requested or that have other dependents.

port uninstall vim
port -u uninstall
port uninstall --follow-dependents python27

Reclaims disk space by uninstalling inactive ports and removing unneeded installation files.

For a given group, selects a version to be the default by creating appropriate symbolic links. For instance, python might be linked to python2.6. Available select groups are installed as subdirectories of ${prefix}/etc/select/ and can be listed using --summary. To list the available versions in a group, use --list. To see which version is currently selected for a group, use --show. To change the selected version for a group, use --set.

port select --summary
port select --show python
port select --list python
port select --set python python34

Activate the installed portname.

Deactivate the installed portname.

Mark portname as requested.

Mark portname as unrequested.

Alias for unsetrequested command.

Show the installed version, variants and activation status for each portname. If no arguments are given, all installed ports are displayed.

Print the install location of a given port.

Lists the files installed by portname.

Determines which port owns a given file and can take either a relative or absolute path.

port provides /opt/local/etc/irssi.conf
port provides include/tiff.h

Performs a sync operation only on the ports tree of a MacPorts installation, pulling in the latest revision available of the Portfiles from the MacPorts rsync server.

sudo port -d sync

Lists the installed ports which need a upgrade.

The upgrade action works on a port and its dependencies. If you want to change this behavior, look at the switches for -n (no dependencies) and -R (dependents) above.

port upgrade outdated

port upgrade vim

port -R upgrade libiconv

port upgrade --force vim

port -n upgrade wireshark

port upgrade --no-rev-upgrade outdated

Manually check for broken binaries and rebuild ports containing broken binaries. rev-upgrade is usually automatically run after each upgrade, unless you specify the --no-rev-upgrade option.
rev-upgrade can run more checks against a special loadcommand in Mach-O binaries that should always be referencing the file itself. This check is most helpful for maintainers to check whether their ports have been built correctly. It is disabled by default and can be enabled by passing --id-loadcmd-check to rev-upgrade.
See also: macports.conf(5)

Clean the files used for building portname. To just remove the work files, use the --work actionflag. This is the default when no flag is given. To remove the distribution files (fetched tarballs, patches, etc), specify --dist. To remove any archive(s) of a port than remain in the temporary download directory, pass --archive. (This does not remove archives from the installed location.) To remove log files for a port, pass --logs. To remove the work files, distribution files, temporary archives and logs pass --all.

port clean --dist vim
port clean --archive vim
port clean --logs vim

port clean --archive vim 6.2.114

port clean --archive vim '6.*'

Parses and shows log files for portname. To filter log files by some criterions use --phase to specify the phase you want to show and --verbosity to specify message category (msg, info, debug).

port log --phase configure vim
port log --phase fetch --verbosity debug vim

Displays the path to the log file for portname.

Writes to stdout the arguments passed to port. This follows the expansion of pseudo-portnames, portname glob patterns, pseudo-portname selectors and the evaluation of port-expressions. echo may be used to determine the exact set of ports to which a given string of arguments will expand, without performing any further operations on them.

port echo category:net
port echo maintainer:jmpp and name:netw
port echo maintainer:jmpp and \( net* or category:text \)

If no argument is given, display a list of the latest version of all available ports. If portname(s) are given as arguments, display a list of the latest version of each port.
Note that virtually all use cases involving the list action with one or more arguments would now be better served by a different action, such as installed, echo, info or outdated.

Create/update a local mirror of distfiles used for ports given on the command line. The filemap database can be reset by using the --new option (though if no database is found, it will be created automatically). If the fetched file does not match the checksum given in the Portfile, it is deleted. This can be used with pseudo-portnames, e.g. all, to mirror everything. Note that if you use all, you’ll most likely want to use -p so port doesn’t quit on the first download failure.

Display the release number of the installed MacPorts infrastructure.

Updates the MacPorts system, ports tree(s) and base tools if needed, from the MacPorts rsync server, installing the newest infrastructure available.

sudo port selfupdate

Provides a shortcut to using launchctl to load a port’s daemon (as installed in /Library/LaunchDaemons). It runs:

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.${port}.plist

A shortcut to launchctl, like load, but unloads the daemon.

A shortcut to launchctl, like load and unload, but reloads the daemon.

Loads the home page for the given portname in the default web browser.

Displays a condensed usage summary.

Displays a summary of all available actions and port command syntax on stdout.

Displays the path to the directory containing portname.

Displays the path to the work directory for portname.

Changes the current working directory to the one containing portname. Only useful in shell mode.

Displays the path to the Portfile for portname.

Displays the URL for the path of the given portname, which can be passed as port-url.

Concatenates and prints the contents of Portfile on stdout.

Opens Portfile with your default editor specified in your shell’s environment variable. You can also use the --editor flag on the command line to specify an alternative editor.

port edit --editor nano apache2

Fetches the distribution files required to build portname.

Compute the checksums of the distribution files for portname, and compare them to the checksums listed in Portfile.

Extracts the distribution files for portname.

Applies any required patches to portname’s extracted distribution files.

Runs any configure process for portname.

Build portname.

Installs portname to a temporary directory.

Tests portname.

Verifies Portfile for portname. To nitpick about whitespace and patchfile names, use --nitpick.

Update portname’s checksums and revision for a new version.

Check if the distfiles haven’t changed and can be fetched.

Display each distfile, its checksums, and the URLs used to fetch it.

Check if the software hasn’t been updated since the Portfile was last modified.

Creates a macOS installer package of portname.

Creates a macOS installer metapackage of portname and its dependencies.

Creates an Internet-enabled disk image containing a macOS package of portname.

Creates an Internet-enabled disk image containing a macOS metapackage of portname and its dependencies.

Global configuration file for the MacPorts system.

Global listing of the ports trees used by MacPorts. This file also enables rsync synchronization.

Global variants used when a port is installed.

User configuration file for the MacPorts system. It overrides the global macports.conf(5) file.