Migrating a MacPorts install to a new major OS version or CPU architecture

An installation of MacPorts and the ports installed by it are only designed to work on a single OS release and a single CPU architecture. If you upgrade to a new OS version (e.g. from Tiger to Leopard) or migrate to a new machine with a different type of CPU (e.g. PowerPC to Intel), you may get lucky and have your ports keep working, but in general, things will break.

Reinstall Xcode and MacPorts

After performing either of these types of system upgrades, you will first need to install the base MacPorts system again, either from the appropriate disk image or from source. If you are upgrading from a prior version of Mac OS X, install the latest version of Xcode for your new OS. This will not be done for you automatically; Xcode is not updated by Software Update, so you must update it manually. You will find the Xcode installer on the Mac OS X installation DVD or on the Apple Developer web site. Finally, reinstall all your ports.

Reinstall ports

To reinstall your ports:

1. Save the list of installed ports:

   port installed > myports.txt
   

2. Clean any partially completed builds, and uninstall all installed ports:

   sudo port clean installed
   sudo port -f uninstall installed
   

3. Browse myports.txt and install the ports that you actually want to use (as opposed to those that are only needed as dependencies) one by one, remembering to specify the appropriate variants:

   sudo port install portname +variant1 +variant2 ...
   

Note that if you have specified variants which are not the default, you may need to install ports in an order other than the alphabetical order recorded in myports.txt.