Sysadmin Sunday: obsd_pkgscripts for OpenBSD

I'll admit it. As much as I adore OpenBSD, its management of binary packages really could use some work. I've been using OpenBSD since 1998 after meeting Theo in person when HiR went to Defcon 6. Heavy daily use of OpenBSD came in 1999 or early 2000. Back in 2004, I finally got fed up. 4 years of daily use without a really great package management system had finally worn me down to my last nerve. With almost every new release, OpenBSD's dev team says they've improved pkg_add functionality, but truth be known, I still find it left wanting to this very day.

This week on Sysadmin Sunday, I'll discuss some tools I wrote to make OpenBSD sysadmins' lives a little easier.

What are my complaints about OpenBSD's package management? Just to name a few:

1. No good way to search for packages by name
2. The need to memorize long path names to install a binary package from an FTP mirror
3. The need to guess at package file names (tricky with version numbers)

Enter: obsd_pkgscripts, the current incarnation of my work from 2004.

The premise was simple: Download a list of all the packages that are easily searchable, then make a script to search and install the packages via FTP, taking away the repetition, memorization, and guess work.

The package is available for download in the file archives of the HiR Google Group, but this download link may work as well:
obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz (2.5 kB)

To install it, simply download it, uncompress it, and run the included pkg_update.sh script. I'm cheating and using lynx -source to download it. It comes by default with OpenBSD, shoot me.

$ lynx -source http://h-i-r.googlegroups.com/web/obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz \
> obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz
$ file obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz
obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz: gzip compressed data, from Unix
$ tar xzvf obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz
pkgscripts
pkgscripts/README
pkgscripts/pkg_get.sh
pkgscripts/pkg_scan.sh
pkgscripts/pkg_update.sh
$ pkgscripts/pkg_update.sh
cat: /home/axon/.tmpkg/mirror: No such file or directory
Package index directory does not exist! Creating Directory...
Package index directory created.
Downloading package index from ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.2/packages/sparc/ ...
Download complete!

As you can see, there's a README (I'd read it if I were you!), and three scripts: pkg_update.sh, pkg_scan.sh and pkg_get.sh. pkg_update, which we ran already, simply finds out what version and architecture of OpenBSD you're running and fetches the package index for that platform. It also creates the mirror configuration file if it doesn't already exist. This allows you to choose which OpenBSD mirror to use, if the default one isn't what you want.

pkg_scan.sh just tells you the names of packages that match your query. It simply uses grep on the package index. For instance, if we were looking for the xmms audio player, we'd find a lot of packages (xmms and all its plugin packages):

$ pkg_scan.sh xmms
faad-xmms-2.0p5.tgz
py-xmms-1.06p0.tgz
xmms-1.2.10p9.tgz
xmms-bonk-0.12p0.tgz
xmms-esd-1.2.10p5.tgz
xmms-flac-1.1.2p1.tgz
... output truncated ...

pkg_get.sh takes this a step further and actually installs the package. If you plan on running pkg_get as a normal user (recommended), you must have sudo access to run pkg_add. Otherwise, run pkg_get as root (not recommended). Optionally, you can add it to your path in the profile for your shell like I did. pkg_get.sh won't install a package until you have a totally unique package name. For example, autoconf is one of those bizarre packages where there are many versions available. If I try installing it with pkg_get.sh autoconf, I will get an error:

$ pkg_get.sh autoconf
autoconf-2.13p0.tgz
autoconf-2.52p1.tgz
autoconf-2.54p1.tgz
autoconf-2.56p0.tgz
autoconf-2.57p0.tgz
autoconf-2.58p1.tgz
autoconf-2.59p1.tgz
autoconf-2.60p1.tgz
autoconf-2.61p1.tgz
Ambiguous package name. Please be more specific.

But if I enter a unique-enough filename, it will install it. You don't need to type the whole filename, just enough of it to not match more than one package.

$ pkg_get.sh autoconf-2.61
Attempting to fetch/install package...
autoconf-2.61p1: complete

OpenBSD's pkg_add has come a long way. It will automatically download any necessary dependencies if it can find them in the same directory as the binary package you're installing. As such, my scripts don't have to do the exrta work as long as the dependencies are out there to be downloaded. This can be witnessed if we try something more complex, such as ImageMagick, a command-line image manipulation tool:

$ pkg_get.sh ImageMagick-
ImageMagick-6.3.4.1-no_x11.tgz
ImageMagick-6.3.4.1.tgz
Ambiguous package name. Please be more specific.

$ pkg_get.sh ImageMagick-6.3.4.1-no_x11
Attempting to fetch/install package...
bzip2-1.0.4: complete
jasper-1.900.1: complete
jbigkit-1.6p1: complete
lcms-1.15: complete
netpbm-10.26.42: complete
ghostscript-8.54p1-no_x11:ghostscript-fonts-8.11p0: complete
ghostscript-8.54p1-no_x11: complete
libxml-2.6.29: complete
ImageMagick-6.3.4.1-no_x11: complete
... post-install message truncated ...
--- ghostscript-fonts-8.11p0 -------------------
... post-install message truncated ...

As you can see, a few tiny scripts can make a world of difference when trying to install packages in OpenBSD.

See Also:
More HiR Information Report Sysadmin Sunday articles

Related OpenBSD Man pages:
pkg_add(1)
pkg_info(1)
pkg_delete(1)