This article appeared in the 2014 March/April edition of the FreeBSD Journal. It is presented in its original form and is not up-to-date.

Poudriere

Stop using portmaster, portupgrade and ports on your servers and switch to packages.

Setting up your own package builds with Poudriere takes only a few minutes and will save you a lot of time in the future.

To simplify server management I create “meta” packages in FreeBSD ports that can generate a package with only dependencies on other packages. This allows to me to just install this 1 package on the target server and have it pull in all of the packages that I want on there. I assign each server specific “roles” and only install 1 or 2 packages per server depending on which roles they fulfill. The roles may be one of “dev”, “web”, “ports-dev”, “jail”, etc. This ensures that all servers fulfilling specific roles will always have the proper packages installed. For some applications, I use a dedicated jail with a meta package that only pulls in the required dependencies for that application to run. For instance, on a PHP application jail, the meta package may pull in nginx, php, eaccelerator, git, etc.