See screenshots of packagesbootstrap in action!
packagesbootstrap is a small utility which bulk downloads OpenBSD binary packages. The downloaded packages can then be installed en masse, minimising downtime. packagesbootstrap has a number of useful features:
pkg_info directly. If a list of packages is not specified, the output from pkg_info on the machine packagesbootstrap is being run on is used automatically.-current or -stable. packagesbootstrap detects which version the user is running, but this can be overridden.When you run packagesbootstrap, it goes to the specified FTP server and downloads the list of packages stored there. It then looks at the list of packages you wish to download, and attempts to find an appropriate match for each one on the FTP server. When multiple versions of the package exist (e.g. typically autoconf has several versions for download), packagesbootstrap will interactively ask you which version you wish to download. You may download more than one version.
Once matches have been found for packages, packagesbootstrap then downloads each package, one by one. Once it has downloaded all packages, it warns you of any packages you requested for which it was unable to find a match. Typically such packages are ones with restrictive licenses, which you will have to build manually from the ports system.
You can get a good idea of how packagesbootstrap works by looking at the screenshots of it in action.
packagesbootstrap can be called as follows:
packagesbootstrap [<options>] [<packages list>]
<packages list> is either a list of package names, separated by newlines, or the output from the pkg_info command. If <packages list> is not specified, the list of packages installed on current machine will be used.
Other options are as follows:
-f <ftp server>
Default: ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/
FTP server to download binary packages from. Please be considerate, and use a local mirror.
-o <version>
Default: Depends on OS installed
OS version number. e.g. 3.7 or snapshot
-a <arch>
Default: The current machine architecture
Architecture to download packages for. e.g. i386 or sparc
-d <dir>
Default: /usr/ports/packages/arch/all
Directory to save packages to.
-l
Default: Off
Do not prompt if multiple matches found. Automatically downloads all matches. This option makes packagesbootstrap completely non-interactive.
There are various potential ways that packagesbootstrap could be used. I typically use it to minimise downtime when updating a server. Such uses tend to look as follows:
packagesbootstrap -f http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/amd64/ -d packages PKG_PATH=packages:http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/OpenBSD/snapshots/packages/amd64/ sudo pkg_add -ui
This downloads new packages for everything that is installed on my machine, then
uses pkg_add to upgrade everything. Note the PKG_PATH first
specifies the directory where the packages live, then the FTP mirror. This is
because sometimes upgrading a package can install new dependencies. By default,
the above incantation will use the locally downloaded packages (nearly all
cases), using remote packages when necessary (which is rarely).
packagesbootstrap is released under a BSD / MIT licence.
packagesbootstrap is part of my bin repository; you can track packagesbootstrap’s evolution via git.
Part of packagesbootstrap’s functionality can be achieved via
pkg_add -uin with an appropriately set PKG_CACHE. If
you are using packagesbootstrap to install packages on more
than one machine of the same architecture (where each machine currently has
identical packages installed), pkg_add -uin might be for you.
Otherwise packagesbootstrap might be more appropriate.