MacPorts version is available in various formats for download and installation:
Checksums for our packaged downloads are contained in the corresponding checksums file.
Please note that in order to install and run MacPorts on Mac OS X, your system must have installations of the following components:
The easiest way to install MacPorts on a Mac OS X system is by downloading the dmg for Leopard (Universal), Tiger (Universal) or Panther (PowerPC), respectively, and running the system's Installer by double-clicking on the pkg contained therein, following the on-screen instructions until completion.
This procedure will place a fully-functional and default MacPorts installation on your host system, ready for usage. If needed your shell configuration files will be adapted by the installer to include the necessary settings to run MacPorts and the programs it installs, but you may need to open a new shell for these changes to take effect.
The MacPorts “selfupdate” command will also be run for you by the installer to ensure you have our latest available release and the latest revisions to the “Portfiles” that contain the instructions employed in the building and installation of ports. After installation is done, it is recommended that you run this step manually on a regular basis to to keep your MacPorts system always current:
sudo port -v selfupdate
At this point you should be ready to enjoy MacPorts!
Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.
If on the other hand you decide to install MacPorts from source, there are still a couple of things you will need to do after downloading the tarball before you can start installing ports, namely compiling and installing MacPorts itself:
These steps need to be perfomed from an administrator account, for which “sudo” will ask the password upon installation. This procedure will install a pristine MacPorts system and, if the optional steps are taken, remove the as of now unnecessary MacPorts- source directory and corresponding tarball.
To customize your installation you should read the output of “./configure --help | more” and pass the appropriate options for the settings you wish to tweak to the configuration script in the steps detailed above.
You will need to manually adapt your shell's environment to work with MacPorts and your chosen installation prefix (the value passed to configure's --prefix flag, defaulting to /opt/local):
Lastly, you need to synchronize your installation with the MacPorts rsync server:
sudo port -v selfupdate
Upon completion MacPorts will be ready to install ports!
It is recommended to run the above command on a regular basis to keep your installation current. Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.
If you are developer or a user with a taste for the bleeding edge and wish for the latest changes and feature additions, you may acquire the MacPorts sources through subversion. See the Guide section on installing from subversion.
Purpose-specific branches are also available at the url.
Alternatively, if you'd simply like to view the SVN repository without checking it out, you can do so via the Trac source browser.
If you already have MacPorts installed and have no restrictions to use the rsync networking protocol (tcp port 873 by default), the easiest way to upgrade to our latest available release, , is by using the selfupdate target of the port(1) command. This will both update your ports tree (by performing a sync operation) and rebuild your current installation if it's outdated, preserving your customizations, if any.
Running on platforms other than Mac OS X is not the main focus of The MacPorts Project, so remaining cross-platform is not an actively-pursued development goal. Nevertheless, it is not an actively-discouraged goal either and as a result some experimental support does exist for other POSIX-compliant platforms such as *BSD and GNU/Linux.
The full list of requirements to run MacPorts on these other platforms is as follows (we assume you have the basics such as GCC and X11):
Normally you must install from source or from an SVN checkout to run MacPorts on any of these platforms. Experimental packaging is available for the FreeBSD (.tbz package), Fedora (.rpm package) and Ubuntu (.deb package) operating systems.
Help on a wide variety of topics is also available in the project Guide and through our Trac portal should you run into any problems installing and/or using MacPorts. Of particular relevance are the installation & usage sections of the former and the FAQ section of the Wiki, where we keep track of questions frequently fielded on our mailing lists.
If any of these resources do not answer your questions or if you need any kind of extended support, there are many ways to contact us!