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Using Portage to Manage Packages in Gentoo

Published by Linode
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Gentoo provides its entire operating system in source format. These source packages, in concert with ebuild scripts, provide a package management system that borrows and builds on many concepts from the BSD’s “portage” system.

Like Arch, the Gentoo project produces new versions of Gentoo Linux on a rolling release cycle.

This guide addresses common package management tasks and functions using the emerge front end for the portage system. We encourage you to install the “gentoolkit” to provide additional package management tools, such as equery. Install this package with the following command:

sudo emerge app-portage/gentoolkit

Before You Begin

Before running the commands within this guide, you will need:

  1. A system running Gentoo. Review the Creating a Compute Instance guide if you do not yet have a compatible system.

  2. Login credentials to the system for either the root user (not recommended) or a standard user account (belonging to the sudo group) and the ability to access the system through SSH or Lish. Review the Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance guide for assistance on creating and securing a standard user account.

Note
Some commands in this guide require elevated privileges and are prefixed with the sudo command. If you are logged in as the root use (not recommended), you can omit the sudo prefix if desired. If you’re not familiar with the sudo command, see the Linux Users and Groups guide.

Emerge/Portage Commands

  • sudo emerge --sync

    Updates the local copy of the portage tree, so that your local system can download and install the latest version of the software.

  • sudo emerge --update --deep world

    Checks and updates all packages on the system to the latest version. This should be run regularly to avoid falling behind on a critical update.

  • emerge --search [term] or emerge -s [term]

    Searches the names of all of the packages for the given keyword. This command accepts a regular expression as the keyword argument.

  • emerge --searchdoc [term] or emerge -S [term]

    Searches the full description for a given keyword. This command accepts a regular expression as the keyword argument.

  • sudo emerge [package]

    Installs the specified package or packages.

  • sudo emerge -u [package]

    Updates the specified package to the latest version. Using the flag -uD also updates dependencies.

  • sudo emerge --depclean [package] or sudo emerge -c [package]

    Removes the specified package or packages.

  • sudo emerge --depclean

    Removes packages that are orphaned. This means removal of all packages that weren’t explicitly installed and do not depend upon any specific package. We recommend that you run it with the --pretend option before running this command on a production system.

  • emerge -evp --deep world

    Lists all of the packages currently installed on the system.

  • equery depends [package]

    Lists all of the packages that depend upon the specified package.

  • equery files [package]

    Lists all of the files “owned” by a package.

  • equery belongs [filename]

    Lists the package that “owns” a particular file.

USE Flags

Portage also makes it possible to install additional variants of a package with USE flags, which allow the user to enable support for a particular option related to that package. To discover which USE flags are available for a given package, issue the following command:

equery uses package-name

The equery command depends on the gentoolkit package. This will provide information about what USE flags are available and which have been installed. To specify additional USE flags:

echo "package-name USE-flags" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge package-name

This will install the specified package with the appropriate options enabled.

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