Pkgsrc

pkgsrc
DevelopersAlistair Crooks, Hubert Feyrer and Johnny C. Lam
ReleaseJanuary 4, 1998; 28 years ago (1998-01-04)
Stable release
2026Q2 / 23 June 2026; 4 months ago (23 June 2026)
Written inC, Unix shell
Operating systemUnix-like
TypePackage management system
LicenseBSD License
Websitewww.pkgsrc.org
Repository

pkgsrc (package source) is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 1999, support for Solaris was added, followed by support for other operating systems.

As of September 2025, pkgsrc currently contains over 29,000 packages and includes most popular open-source software. It is the native package manager on NetBSD, SmartOS and MINIX 3, and is portable across 23 different operating systems, including AIX, various BSD derivatives, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, macOS, Solaris, and QNX.

There are multiple ways to install programs using pkgsrc. The pkgsrc bootstrap contains a traditional ports collection that utilizes a series of makefiles to compile software from source. Another method is to install pre-built binary packages via the pkg_add and pkg_delete tools. A high-level utility named pkgin also exists, and is designed to automate the installation, removal, and update of binary packages in a manner similar to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool.

Supported platforms

Platform Date added
NetBSD October 1997
Solaris March 1999
Linux June 1999
Darwin and macOS October 2001
FreeBSD November 2002
OpenBSD November 2002
IRIX December 2002
BSD/OS December 2003
AIX December 2003
Interix (for Windows NT) March 2004
DragonFly BSD October 2004
OSF/1 November 2004
HP-UX April 2007
QNX October 2007
Haiku January 2010
MINIX 3 August 2010
MirBSD January 2011
illumos and SmartOS February 2011
Cygwin May 2013
GNU/kFreeBSD July 2013
Bitrig June 2015

History

On October 3, 1997, NetBSD developers Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer created pkgsrc based on the FreeBSD ports system and intended to support the NetBSD packages collection. It was officially released as part of NetBSD 1.3 on January 4, 1998. DragonFly BSD used pkgsrc as its official package system from version 1.4 in 2006, to 3.4 in 2013.

On 2017-09-12, a commit message policy that accommodates DVCS was established by the project.

Packages

The NetBSD Foundation provides official, pre-built binary packages for multiple combinations of NetBSD and pkgsrc releases, and occasionally for certain other operating systems as well.

As of 2018, several vendors provide pre-built binary packages for several platforms:

References

  1. 1 2 "10 years of pkgsrc - pkgsrc and the concepts of package management 1997-2007 (part 1)". www.netbsd.org. The NetBSD Foundation. Retrieved 14 October 2010.
  2. ↑ Maya Rashish (23 June 2026). "Announcing the pkgsrc-2026Q2 branch". Retrieved 9 September 2026.
  3. 1 2 David Chisnall (2006-10-06). "NetBSD: Not Just for Toasters". InformIT. Prentice Hall Professional. Retrieved 2019-07-25.
  4. ↑ Siegert, Benn (25 September 2025). "pkgsrc-2025Q3 released" (Mailing list). Retrieved 1 October 2025.
  5. 1 2 "Joyent Packages Documentation - Install On Linux". Joyent. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  6. 1 2 3 "Joyent Packages Documentation - Install On macOS". Joyent. Archived from the original on 2018-10-06. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  7. ↑ Perkin, Jonathan (2018-10-05). "Announcing the pkgsrc-2018Q3 release". NetBSD. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  8. ↑ "pkgin, a binary package manager for pkgsrc".
  9. ↑ "Information about NetBSD 1.3".
  10. ↑ Dillon, Matthew (2005-08-31). "PKGSRC will be officially supported as of the next release". DragonFly users mailing list.
  11. ↑ Thomas Klausner (2017-09-12). "pkgsrc Commit Message Policy". pkgsrc-users@ (Mailing list). NetBSD. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  12. ↑ "Index of pub/PKGSRC/Packages/".
  13. 1 2 "Joyent's packages, available for SmartOS/illumos, Linux, and OSX". Archived from the original on 2014-07-15. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  14. ↑ "Index of /Packages/".
  15. 1 2 "Re: Pkgsrc binary packages now available for scientific computing". pkgsrc-users (Mailing list). NetBSD. 2017-08-01. Retrieved 2018-10-13.
  16. ↑ "mirror1.hpc.uwm.edu/pkgsrc/". Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  17. ↑ "Software Management". University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, High Performance Computing dept. Retrieved 2018-10-11.