4.5.5 Upgrading Ports
 
Keeping your ports up to date can be a tedious job. For instance, to upgrade a port you would go to the ports directory, build the port, deinstall the old port, install the new port, and then clean up after the build. Imagine doing that for five ports, tedious right? This was a large problem for system administrators to deal with, and now we have utilities which do this for us. For instance the sysutils/portupgrade utility will do everything for you! Just install it like you would any other port, using the make install clean command.
 
Now create a database with the pkgdb -F command. This will read the list of installed ports and create a database file in the /var/db/pkg directory. Now when you run portupgrade -a, it will read this and the ports INDEX file. Finally, portupgrade will begin to download, build, backup, install, and clean the ports which have been updated. Other utilities exist which will do this, check out the ports/sysutils directory and see what you come up with.