If you have been updating your FreeBSD servers recently I (which I hope you have) you have run into a warning that the old package system will be shut down by the end of summer this year (2014). Some ignore this and some get confused – what now, does FreeBSD handle this automatically? Well as with everything on FreeBSD, no, but it’s very easy to setup 🙂

Fret not – I have a quick and easy way for you to move to pkgng. If you, like me, use portmaster for the majority of your ports operations there will be no change in day to day administration of your servers, at most you will not see the warnings anymore.

First we bootstrap the pkg system (answer yes to bootstrap pkg)

sudo pkg

Now we convert the old pkg_* packages to pkgng format and let it handle the package operations in the future

sudo pkg version
sudo pkg2ng
sudo sh -c 'echo "WITH_PKGNG=yes" >> /etc/make.conf'
sudo rm /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf

That’s it

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