To install binary packages, you first need to know from where to get them. You can get them on CD-ROMs, DVDs, or via FTP or HTTP.

For NetBSD, the binary packages are made available on ftp.NetBSD.org and its mirrors, in the directory /pub/NetBSD/packages/OSVERSION/ARCH/. For OSVERSION, you should insert the output of uname -r, and for ARCH the output of uname -p.

For some other platforms, binary packages can be found at the following locations:

In each of these directories, there is a subdirectory All that contains all the binary packages. Further, there are subdirectories for categories that contain symbolic links that point to the actual binary package in ../All. This directory layout is used for all package repositories, no matter if they are accessed via HTTP, FTP, NFS, CD-ROM, or the local filesystem.

If you have the files on a CD-ROM or downloaded them to your hard disk, you can install them with the following command (be sure to su to root first):

# pkg_add /path/to/package.tgz

If you have FTP access and you don't want to download the packages via FTP prior to installation, you can do this automatically by giving pkg_add an FTP URL:

# pkg_add ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/<OSVERSION>/<ARCH>/All/package.tgz

Note that any prerequisite packages needed to run the package in question will be installed, too, assuming they are present where you install from.

To save some typing, you can set the PKG_PATH environment variable to a semicolon-separated list of paths (including remote URLs); trailing slashes are not allowed.

Additionally to the All directory there exists a vulnerable directory to which binary packages with known vulnerabilities are moved, since removing them could cause missing dependencies. To use these packages, add the vulnerable directory to your PKG_PATH. However, you should run security/audit-packages regularly, especially after installing new packages, and verify that the vulnerabilities are acceptable for your configuration. An example PKG_PATH would be: ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/<OSVERSION>/<ARCH>/All;ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/<OSVERSION>/<ARCH>/vulnerable Please note that semicolon (';') is a shell meta-character, so you'll probably have to quote it.

After you've installed packages, be sure to have /usr/pkg/bin and /usr/pkg/sbin in your PATH so you can actually start the just installed program.

Please pay very careful attention to the warnings expressed in the pkg_add(1) manual page about the inherent dangers of installing binary packages which you did not create yourself, and the security holes that can be introduced onto your system by indiscriminate adding of such files.

The same warning of course applies to every package you install from source when you haven't completely read and understood the source code of the package, the compiler that is used to build the package and all the other tools that are involved.

To build packages from source on a NetBSD system the “comp” and the “text” distribution sets must be installed. If you want to build X11-related packages the “xbase” and “xcomp” distribution sets are required, too.

The first step for building a package is downloading the distfiles (i.e. the unmodified source). If they have not yet been downloaded, pkgsrc will fetch them automatically.

You can overwrite some of the major distribution sites to fit to sites that are close to your own. Have a look at pkgsrc/mk/defaults/mk.conf to find some examples — in particular, look for the MASTER_SORT, MASTER_SORT_REGEX and INET_COUNTRY definitions. This may save some of your bandwidth and time.

You can change these settings either in your shell's environment, or, if you want to keep the settings, by editing the /etc/mk.conf file, and adding the definitions there.

If you don't have a permanent Internet connection and you want to know which files to download, make fetch-list will tell you what you'll need. Put these distfiles into /usr/pkgsrc/distfiles.

Assuming that the distfile has been fetched (see previous section), become root and change into the relevant directory and run make.

For example, type

% cd misc/figlet
% make

at the shell prompt to build the various components of the package, and

# make install

to install the various components into the correct places on your system. Installing the package on your system requires you to be root. However, pkgsrc has a just-in-time-su feature, which allows you to only become root for the actual installation step

Taking the figlet utility as an example, we can install it on our system by building as shown in Appendix B, Build logs.

The program is installed under the default root of the packages tree - /usr/pkg. Should this not conform to your tastes, set the LOCALBASE variable in your environment, and it will use that value as the root of your packages tree. So, to use /usr/local, set LOCALBASE=/usr/local in your environment. Please note that you should use a directory which is dedicated to packages and not shared with other programs (i.e., do not try and use LOCALBASE=/usr). Also, you should not try to add any of your own files or directories (such as src/, obj/, or pkgsrc/) below the LOCALBASE tree. This is to prevent possible conflicts between programs and other files installed by the package system and whatever else may have been installed there.

Some packages look in /etc/mk.conf to alter some configuration options at build time. Have a look at pkgsrc/mk/defaults/mk.conf to get an overview of what will be set there by default. Environment variables such as LOCALBASE can be set in /etc/mk.conf to save having to remember to set them each time you want to use pkgsrc.

Occasionally, people want to “look under the covers” to see what is going on when a package is building or being installed. This may be for debugging purposes, or out of simple curiosity. A number of utility values have been added to help with this.

If you want to install a binary package that you've either created yourself (see next section), that you put into pkgsrc/packages manually or that is located on a remote FTP server, you can use the "bin-install" target. This target will install a binary package - if available - via pkg_add(1), else do a make package. The list of remote FTP sites searched is kept in the variable BINPKG_SITES, which defaults to ftp.NetBSD.org. Any flags that should be added to pkg_add(1) can be put into BIN_INSTALL_FLAGS. See pkgsrc/mk/defaults/mk.conf for more details.

A final word of warning: If you set up a system that has a non-standard setting for LOCALBASE, be sure to set that before any packages are installed, as you can not use several directories for the same purpose. Doing so will result in pkgsrc not being able to properly detect your installed packages, and fail miserably. Note also that precompiled binary packages are usually built with the default LOCALBASE of /usr/pkg, and that you should not install any if you use a non-standard LOCALBASE.

By default, pkgsrc will use GCC to build packages. This may be overridden by setting the following variables in /etc/mk.conf: