Portage

Portage is the package management and distribution system for Gentoo. It essentially functions as the heart of Gentoo and Gentoo-based operating systems.

(Re)Installation
In the case the system somehow does not have Portage (maybe it became corrupted or it was accidentally removed) there are ways it can be recovered.

Here are a few viable solutions in order for a system administrator to get Portage (back) on a system:
 * 1) Have a friend or a build server build Portage binaries build, then transfer them to the broken machine. This could be done using the  Portage feature on a healthy machine or by using the quickpkg command. See the binary package guide for more information.
 * 2) Manually download a copy of a recent Portage release via tarball, build it, and manually install it. The administrator will have to perform all the work that Portage world normally automate. This option could be easier than the first option, and may potentially take less time.
 * 3) Boot up a LiveDVD/CD that has Portage included (Gentoo LiveDVDs or SystemRescueCD should contain Portage). Remove the old or broken Portage and reinstall install Portage to the mounted root filesystem (potentially the fastest and easiest option in the case of a fast internet connection and available CDs/DVDs). For example, if the root file system with broken Portage was mounted at the following commands could be used from a live environment.
 * 4) Change all of Portage's relevant environment variables to be set to the Portage directory of the mounted root filesystem. If the broken Portage root directory is mounted at, the command would look like this:
 * 5) Run the emerge command in order to remove any traces of the old broken Portage package:
 * 6) Sync the Portage Tree in case the system is a bit behind on the current Portage tree:
 * 7) Install the new version of Portage:

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

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

Overlays
In addition to the official repository (colloquially known as the "Portage Tree" because of its traditional placement in ), there are additional repositories which in Gentoo called overlays.


 * Users' guide to Gentoo overlays
 * Layman homepage
 * Browse overlays

It is possible to search through the ebuilds available in the overlays on http://overlays.gentoo.org/ by using the eix tool.

GUI front-ends
There are a few GUI interfaces that exist for Portage, although some of them have become unmaintained.

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

Below you see an exemplary invocation of emerge. The options are shortcuts for ,   and. They trigger emerge to ask before proceeding, display the dependency tree of packages to be installed, and to be verbose with its output. While in the context of Portage, the term "package" can also be referred to as an "atom." Do not be confused if you see the term "atom" used instead of the term "package."

Common invocations
Search for packages with proxy in their names:

Search for packages with proxy in their names or description:

Install the package with   and   options for precaution:

Remove the package using the dependency sensitive   option instead of   which may remove important packages: