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Quickstart
Install Apple's Command Line Developer Tools:
xcode-select --install
Install MacPorts for your version of the Mac operating system:
macOS Tahoe v26
macOS Sequoia v15
macOS Sonoma v14
macOS Ventura v13
Older OS? See here.
Installing MacPorts
MacPorts version 2.12.5 is available in various formats for download and installation (note, if you are upgrading to a new major release of macOS, see the
migration info page
):
“pkg” installers for
Tahoe
Sequoia
Sonoma
, and
Ventura
for use with the macOS Installer.
This is the simplest installation
procedure that most users should
follow
after meeting the requirements listed
below
. Installers for legacy platforms
Monterey
Big Sur
Catalina
Mojave
High Sierra
Sierra
El Capitan
Yosemite
Mavericks
Mountain Lion
Lion
Snow Leopard
and
Leopard
are
also available.
In
source form
as either a
tar.bz2
package or a
tar.gz
one for manual compilation, if you intend to customize your installation
in any way.
Git clone
of the unpackaged sources, if you wish to follow MacPorts development.
The
selfupdate
target of the
port(1)
command, for users who already have
MacPorts installed and wish to upgrade to a newer release.
Checksums for our packaged
downloads
are contained in the corresponding
checksums file
The public key to verify the detached GPG signatures can be found under the
attachments section on jmr's wiki page
. (
Direct Link
).
For some ports, your system might require installations of the following components:
Apple's Command Line Developer Tools, in case a port you're installing or one of its dependencies
are not available as binaries.
It can be installed on recent OS versions by running this command in the Terminal:
xcode-select --install
Older versions are found at the
Apple Developer
site,
or they can be installed from within Xcode back to version 4. Users of Xcode 3 or earlier can install them by ensuring that the appropriate
option(s) are selected at the time of Xcode's install ("UNIX Development", "System Tools", "Command Line Tools", or
"Command Line Support").
(Optional) Apple's
Xcode
Developer Tools, when building some ports from source.
MacPorts will let you know if this is the case.
Using the latest available version that will run on your OS is highly recommended, except for Snow Leopard where the last free version,
3.2.6, is recommended:
26.0 or later for Tahoe
16.0 or later for Sequoia
15.0 or later for Sonoma
14.1 or later for Ventura
13.1 or later for Monterey
12.2 or later for Big Sur
11.3 or later for Catalina
10.0 or later for Mojave
9.0 or later for High Sierra
8.0 or later for Sierra
7.0 or later for El Capitan
6.1 or later for Yosemite
5.0.1 or later for Mavericks
4.4 or later for Mountain Lion
4.1 or later for Lion
3.2 or later for Snow Leopard
3.1 or later for Leopard
It can be found on the
Apple Developer
site, on your Mac operating system installation CDs/DVD, or in the Mac App Store.
With Xcode 4 and later, users need to accept the Xcode EULA by either launching Xcode or running:
xcodebuild -license
(Optional) The X11 windowing environment, for ports that depend on the functionality it provides to run. You have
multiple choices for an X11 server:
Install the xorg-server port from MacPorts (recommended).
The
XQuartz Project
provides a complete X11 release
for macOS including server and client libraries and applications.
Apple's X11.app is provided by the “X11 User” package on older OS versions. It is always installed on Lion, and
is an optional installation on your system CDs/DVD with previous OS versions.
macOS Package (.pkg) Installer
The easiest way to install MacPorts on a Mac is by downloading the pkg or dmg for
Tahoe
Sequoia
Sonoma
Ventura
Monterey
Big Sur
Catalina
Mojave
High Sierra
Sierra
El Capitan
Yosemite
Mavericks
Mountain Lion
Lion
Snow Leopard
or
Leopard
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.
Source Installation
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:
cd
” into the directory where you downloaded the package and run “
tar xjvf
MacPorts-2.12.5.tar.bz2
” or
tar xzvf
MacPorts-2.12.5.tar.gz
”,
depending on whether you downloaded the bz2 tarball or the gz one, respectively.
Build and install the recently unpacked sources:
cd MacPorts-2.12.5
./configure && make && sudo make install
Optionally:
cd ../
rm -rf MacPorts-2.12.5*
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-2.12.5 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
):
Add ${prefix}/bin
and
${prefix}/sbin
to the start of your
PATH
environment variable
so that MacPorts-installed programs take precedence over system-provided programs of the same name.
If a standard
MANPATH
environment variable already exists (that is, one that doesn't contain any empty
components), add the
${prefix}/share/man
path to it so that MacPorts-installed man pages are found by your
shell.
For Tiger and earlier only, add an appropriate X11
DISPLAY
environment variable to run X11-dependent
programs, as Leopard takes care of this requirement on its own.
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.
Git Sources
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 git. See the Guide section on
installing from git
Purpose-specific branches are also available at the
url.
Alternatively, if you'd simply like to view the git repository without checking it out, you can do so via the
GitHub web interface
Selfupdate
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,
2.12.5
, 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.
Other Platforms
Running on platforms other than macOS 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):
mtree
for directory hierarchy.
rsync
for syncing the ports.
cURL
for downloading distfiles.
GNUstep
(Base), for Foundation (optional, can be disabled via configure args).
OpenSSL
for signature verification, and optionally for checksums.
libmd
may
be used instead for checksums.
Normally you must install from
source
or from an
git checkout
to run MacPorts
on any of these platforms.
Help
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
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The MacPorts Project