Reinstall ports

  • Posted by racoonlab
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Reinstall ports

To reinstall your ports:
Save the list of installed ports: 

port -qv installed > myports.txt

Uninstall all installed ports: 

sudo port -f uninstall installed
Clean any partially-completed builds:
<pre>sudo port clean all

Browse myports.txt and install the ports that you actually want to use (as opposed to those that are only needed as dependencies) one by one, remembering to specify the appropriate variants: 

sudo port install portname +variant1 +variant2 ...

Note that if you have specified variants which are not the default, you may need to install ports in an order other than the alphabetical order recorded in myports.txt.

Automatically reinstall ports

A script has been written to automate Step 4 above, though it has some caveats. If it fails, you will just have to do it manually. (But see workaround for conflicting ports below.)

To use it, you will first need to run steps 1-3 as described above. Then:

Run these commands to download and execute the restore_ports script. (If you installed MacPorts from source and put its Tcl package somewhere other than /Library/Tcl, then you’ll need to use the -t option when you run restore_ports.tcl; see ./restore_ports.tcl -h.) 

curl -O https://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/contrib/restore_ports/restore_ports.tcl
chmod +x restore_ports.tcl
sudo ./restore_ports.tcl myports.txt

One known issue is that the script will fail if there are conflicting ports in the list. It’s possible to have conflicting ports installed provided at most one of the conflicting set is active. If the script fails for this reason, you can delete one of the conflicting ports from myports.txt and then simply run the script again. You may need to do this multiple times if there are multiple conflicting ports listed.

The requested status of the ports will also not be preserved, since it is not available to the script. You can restore it manually by doing something like this (where myport1, myport2 etc. are the ports you actually asked for): 

sudo port unsetrequested installed
sudo port setrequested myport1 myport2 …