Manual Pages  — PORTSNAP

• If your clock is set to local time, adding the line

      0 3 * * * root /usr/sbin/portsnap cron

  to /etc/crontab is a good way to make sure you always have an up-to-date snapshot of the ports tree available which can quickly be extracted into /usr/ports. If your clock is set to UTC, please pick a random time other than 3AM, to avoid overly imposing an uneven load on the server(s) hosting the snapshots.

  Note that running portsnap cron or portsnap fetch does not apply the changes that were received: they only download them. To apply the changes, you must follow these commands with portsnap update. The portsnap update command is normally run by hand at a time when you are sure that no one is manually working in the ports tree.

• Running portsnap update from cron(8) is a bad idea -- if you are ever installing or updating a port at the time the cron job runs, you will probably end up in a mess when portsnap updates or removes files which are being used by the port build. However, running portsnap -I update is probably safe, and can be used together with pkg-version(8) to identify installed software which is out of date.
• If you wish to use portsnap to keep a large number of machines up to date, you may wish to set up a caching HTTP proxy. Since portsnap uses fetch(1) to download updates, setting the HTTP_PROXY environment variable will direct it to fetch updates from the given proxy. This is much more efficient than mirroring the files on the portsnap server, since the vast majority of files are not needed by any particular client.

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Update the ports tree:

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