Directions for setting up pkgsrc on Centos 5.5
Beginning with pkgsrc on Centos is rather simple. Before checking out pkgsrc, a base install of Centos is missing several requirements:
yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel cvs
Once these requirements are met, you can checkout and bootstrap pkgsrc:
cd /usr
CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -d anoncvs@anoncvs.NetBSD.org:/cvsroot checkout -rpkgsrc-2011Q1 pkgsrc
Of course, the pkgsrc release might need to be changed, this example is using the current release as of now. I needed the CVS_RSH for this to work, as note the example is assuming your current shell is bash.
After cvs finishes up, you should have /usr/pkgsrc – time to bootstrap:
cd /usr/pkgsrc/bootstrap
./bootstrap
This will build the base package management utilities, bmake, et al.
The last step before you get going is making sure /usr/pkg is higher priority in your PATH env variable. This would be done in your bash/csh/etc profile script normally. Setting it on the command line is fine for now (again, depending on your shell, I’m using the base install of bash here):
export PATH=/usr/pkg/bin:/usr/pkg/sbin:$PATH
For this step, I’ll build mail/postfix:
cd /usr/pkgsrc/mail/postfix
bmake
You’ll likely hit a snag:
> ERROR: No usable termcap library found on the system.
This is resolved by install ncurses development files:
yum install ncurses-devel
Restart the build and things should compile cleanly, you can install the package normally.
Using pkgsrc on sysv-rc based servers is a little easier, as sysv-rc follows the same dependency type model that pkgsrc’s rc.subr does. This allows you to use pkgsrc scripts by simply copying the init script to /etc/rc.d and making some small changes to the init script header.
Centos does not use sysv-rc however, and so a little more hand holding is required. To tie pkgsrc init scripts in with Centos’ init, you’ll need to edit the scripts and decide boot priority yourself.
First, install rc.subr, this will still be used by pkgsrc init scripts:
cd /usr/pkgsrc/pkgtools/rc.subr
bmake
bmake install
There was one change I needed to make on my Debian servers:
--- /etc/rc.subr~ 2011-04-23 06:02:34.000000000 +0000
+++ /etc/rc.subr 2011-04-23 06:03:01.000000000 +0000
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@
_RCCMD_rcs="/usr/bin/rcs"
_RCCMD_rm="/bin/rm"
_RCCMD_sh="/bin/sh"
-_RCCMD_su="/usr/bin/su"
+_RCCMD_su="/bin/su"
_RCCMD_systrace="/bin/systrace"
_RCCMD_whoami="/usr/bin/whoami"
Using postfix as the example still, install the init script from pkgsrc:
cd /etc/init.d
cp /usr/pkg/share/examples/rc/postfix .
The init script will require changes here, and the normal changes to /etc/rc.conf are required as well.
That is, very briefly, how to maintain the init scripts installed by pkgsrc packages. There is a lot more to configuring the scripts however, I will try to expand with a later article.