Basic Usage

There are a number of executables installed with Portmod, however for the most part you only need to use the portmod executable, combined with the prefix name you created using the portmod init subcommand, which will be represented here by <prefix>.

Mods can be installed by passing the relevant atoms as command line arguments to the merge command. E.g.: portmod <prefix> merge omwllf

You can search for mods using the search subcommand. By default, it searches the name only but will also search the description if you include the --description/-d option. E.g.: portmod <prefix> search --description foo

Specific versions of mods can be installed by including the version number: portmod <prefix> merge abandoned-flat-2.0

Specified mods will be automatically be downloaded, configured and installed.

The -c/--depclean flag will remove the specified mods and all mods that depend on, or are dependencies of, the specified mods.

The -C/--unmerge flag will remove the specified mods, ignoring dependencies

You can view useful information about your current setup using portmod <prefix> info.

Changes to package repositories can be fetched using the portmod sync command.

You can update all installed mods (including dependencies and dependency changes) using the command portmod <prefix> merge --update --deep @world (or portmod <prefix> merge -uD @world)

After updates, you should clean unneeded dependencies using portmod <prefix> merge --depclean (without any arguments). This can also be done during updates using the --auto-depclean/-x flag, however you should carefully examine the transaction list to make sure that it isn’t removing anything you wanted to keep.

Downloads

Downloaded source files are stored in $CACHE_DIR/downloads (as reported by portmod <prefix> info). Additionally, portmod will also detect files found in ~/Downloads, in XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR (on Linux), as well as the path stored in the DOWNLOADS environment variable, if present. These files will be moved into $CACHE_DIR/downloads during installation.

Note that due to technical limitations of the SRC_URI syntax, download files cannot include spaces, and in the case of manual downloads these will usually be replaced by underscores in the file expected by portmod. To handle this, portmod will detect and rename such files containing spaces to include only underscores, there is no need to rename them manually.