Scheduling MacPorts updates

October 5th, 2007

I like to stay pretty current with ports - generally it avoids Big Update Day where you realise you need a 0.0.0.0.0.1 update of something but most of the dependencies have seen several man-years of development in the mean time. Here is a launchd script to drop in /Library/LaunchDaemons (I called it org.macports.port-selfupdate.plist):

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
    "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.macports.port-selfupdate</string>
    <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
    <true/>
    <key>Nice</key>
    <integer>1</integer>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
        <string>/opt/local/bin/port</string>
        <string>selfupdate</string>
    </array>
    <key>ServiceDescription</key>
    <string>Update MacPorts binary and ports tree</string>
    <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Hour</key>
        <integer>21</integer>
        <key>Minute</key>
        <integer>00</integer>
    </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

You can load it without rebooting by running:

    $ sudo launchctl load \
        /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.port-selfupdate.plist

I guess it could be done with periodic, but I wanted to play around with launchd. You may wish to adjust the time too - this is for my home machine. I am usually working at 9pm, when most normal people are watching telly.

Posted by ashleymoran Filed in Tech

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