PortsDB is a program that imports the FreeBSD ports tree into an SQLite database.
SQLite is a relational database. In many cases it is easier to query data in a relational database than when the data is in text files.
Just run the command './import.sh' on a FreeBSD system. It will run for several minutes and will create the database 'ports.sqlite'. Then you can update your ports tree and run './update.sh', which will update the database with all new commits.
A variety of applications can easily run SQL queries against the PortsDB database to
- list ports or packages
- list port dependencies in both directions
- find the list of ports maintained by a particular maintainer
- search ports by the content of their comment
- any other similar applications
There are only few dependencies:
- Bourne shell (/bin/sh) which is already present on all systems
- BSD make which is already present on all systems
- SQLite database application which can be installed from the 'sqlite3' package
- git program
- gsed program
- Ease of use: users only need to run import.sh to import the ports tree into a database. They can also choose to run update.sh to quickly update the database with new commits, instead of re-running import.sh, which takes longer
- Performance: import.sh only takes ~15 minutes, depending on the system.
- No artificial keys: we didn't introduce any external integer keys into tables. Tables are indexed with PKGORIGIN in the form of {carteg}/{name} and flavor. This makes tables easy to understand and easy to query.
There is an excellent SQLite DB viewer SQLiteStudio that can be installed with pkg install SQLiteStudio.