Portage

Portage is package manager and distribution system for Gentoo.]] It functions as the heart of Gentoo-based operating systems. Portage includes many commands for repository and package management, the primary of which is the command.

The most common questions about portage and the command are handled in the Portage FAQ.

Installation
All Gentoo installations come with Portage, so there is no need to install it ! The rest of this section is for the very rare occasion of issues with portage, feel free to skip to the next section.

Like all data, there is a possibility Portage can become corrupted or even uninstalled, which is very bad. If this is the case there are ways Portage can be recovered, however Portage re-installation can be quite a hassle. It becomes a work of manual labor: installing a package manager without a package manager.

See Fix My Gentoo for details on emergency installation via binary packages. See also Fixing broken Portage.

Updating
In order for Gentoo to stay up to date, Portage must stay up to date. If the following message is visible after an, it is important to do what the text says before updating other packages.

This is short hand expression for:

This will tell Portage to exclusively update itself. After Portage has been updated, users can then update other packages.

Files
There are many files used to configure Portage.

See /etc/portage configuration files for an exhaustive list of configuration files.

Environment variables
Portage can be configured to a vast extent through environment variables.

This is a partial list of environment variables used to configure Portage:


 * EPREFIX : Target prefix to be used for merging packages or ebuilds.
 * ROOT : Target root filesystem to be used for merging the requested packages or ebuilds and their runtime dependencies.
 * SYSROOT : Target root filesystem to be used for merging the build dependencies satisfied by DEPEND.
 * PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT : Location for various portage configuration files. This variable can be set via the  option. However, it is now superseded  by the SYSROOT variable and can only be given if its value matches SYSROOT or if ROOT =.

See for detailed information on available environment variables and the Handbook for working with environment variables in Gentoo.

To view all presently set environment variables, run:

Environment variables can be set on a per-package basis via /etc/portage/package.env entries.

Ebuild repositories
In addition to the Gentoo repository, there are additional ebuild repositories.


 * Gentoo hosted repositories
 * Browse ebuild repositories [3rd party]
 * Adding ebuild repositories to the installation

It is possible to search through the ebuilds available in the ebuild repositories on https://repos.gentoo.org/ by using the eix tool.

Usage
Portage includes many different tools and utilities to help with system administration and maintenance. The following sections list these in alphabetical order.

archive-conf
The purpose of is to save off a config file in the dispatch-conf archive directory. Most users should not ever need to run this command:

dispatch-conf
The utility is used to manage configuration file updates. See the dispatch-conf article.

ebuild
is Portage's command for running the various ebuild functions. For disambiguation see the ebuild article.

egencache
The tool rebuilds the cache of metadata information for the ebuild repositories. See the egencache article for additional information.

emaint
Performs package management related system health checks and maintenance.

See for detailed information.

The command is now implemented with. See Portage's sync operation.

emerge
is the command-line interface to Portage and is how most users will interact with Portage. The command has many possible options. For a complete list of all options see its man page:

Below is an example invocation of. The options are short options for ,  , and. They trigger to ask before proceeding, display the dependency tree of packages to be installed, and to be verbose with its output.

In the context of Portage, the term "package" can also be referred to as an "atom.", the terms can be used interchangeably.

Search for packages
Search for packages with proxy in their names:

Search for packages with proxy in their names or description:

The repository can also be searched online at packages.gentoo.org.

Show more detailed information and ask for confirmation
The  option is very useful, it will allow the emerge actions to be reviewed before the actual operation begins.

The  option will show more detailed information about what Portage will do, and is often helpful.

Install the package with   and   options for precaution:

Options can be set as default, if desired. Default options can be overridden on the command line, for example.

Remove (uninstall) packages
Remove the package using the dependency sensitive   option:

Verifying and (re)downloading distfiles
To re-verify the integrity of and re-download previously removed/corrupted distfiles for all currently installed packages, run:

emerge-webrsync
is called internally by when   in /etc/portage/repos.conf is set to.

portageq
For details see portageq.

quickpkg
See the Binary package guide for more information.

repoman
Since version 2.3.0 is packaged separately  from Portage. See the article for additional information.

glsa-check
Gentoo Linux Security Announcements (GLSAs) are notifications sent out to the community to inform of security vulnerabilities related to Gentoo Linux or to packages contained in the repository.

is a tool to keep track of the various GLSAs. It can be used to view GLSAs, but more importantly to test if the system is vulnerable to known GLSAs.

See "man glsa-check" and "glsa-check --help" for more information:

Main (Gentoo) ebuild repository sync time
To see when the Gentoo ebuild repository was last updated (synced), run the following command:

Emerging packages fail during 'unpack' stage
The following message is occurs when emerging packages:

* Error messages for package dev-libs/libinput-1.16.0: * The ebuild phase 'unpack' has exited unexpectedly. This type of behavior * is known to be triggered by things such as failed variable assignments * (bug #190128) or bad substitution errors (bug #200313). Normally, before * exiting, bash should have displayed an error message above. If bash did * not produce an error message above, it's possible that the ebuild has * called `exit` when it should have called `die` instead. This behavior * may also be triggered by a corrupt bash binary or a hardware problem * such as memory or cpu malfunction. If the problem is not reproducible or * it appears to occur randomly, then it is likely to be triggered by a  * hardware problem. If you suspect a hardware problem then you should try * some basic hardware diagnostics such as memtest. Please do not report * this as a bug unless it is consistently reproducible and you are sure * that your bash binary and hardware are functioning properly.

Although possible to be caused by the reasons listed in the output above, this issue is more likely caused by low disk space in the path used by Portage to unpack the ebuild's source files. This location is set via the PORTAGE_TMPDIR variable and can be quickly found by querying Portage:

Next, use the command to view the disk space in the partition where PORTAGE_TMPDIR has been mounted. For Handbook formatted systems this will likely be the root partition. See Freeing disk space for details on how to free up disk space.

Related to Portage

 * Category:Portage
 * Category:Portage
 * Category:Portage
 * Category:Portage
 * Category:Portage
 * Category:Portage

Portage in the Gentoo AMD64 Handbook

 * A Portage introduction
 * USE flags
 * Portage features
 * Files and directories
 * Configuring through variables
 * Mixing software branches
 * Additional Portage tools
 * Custom Portage tree
 * Advanced Portage features

External resources

 * packages.gentoo.org - online searchable database of packages from the Gentoo package repository.

Portage man pages
The man pages contain complete technical documentation for Portage. Type man in a shell on a Gentoo system to read the local man page. Note that man pages have a see also section for further information.


 * emerge - command-line interface to the Portage system - emerge man page.
 * Portage configuration files - Portage man page.