Links:
PortsDB URL: https://github.com/yurivict/freebsd-portsdb/

Contact: Yuri Victorovich <yuri@FreeBSD.org>

I developed the PortsDB project that imports FreeBSD ports into an SQLite database. The port is ports-mgmt/portsdb.

The database can be fully rebuilt in around 20 minutes, after which it can be quickly (in seconds) updated with new commits.

The database is currently updated hourly: https://people.freebsd.org/~yuri/ports.sqlite.

PortsDB can be used to query ports using SQL, as a relational database. External services like Repology, FreshPorts, Portscout, and other similar services can use PortsDB to access information in the ports tree.

Users can, for example, easily find their broken ports, or port duplicates, or all ports that they maintain that use gmake, among many other possible queries. Such queries aren’t easy to perform by grepping the ports tree.

Cross-DB queries are also easy to do. They can combine PortsDB, /var/db/pkg/repo-FreeBSD.sqlite, and /var/db/pkg/local.sqlite.

All that needs to be done to run PortsDB is ./import.sh, and then ./update.sh after more commits are pulled into the ports repository.

The periodic script is provided that can simplify integration with cron. Multiple ready to use SQL queries are also included.

One particular immediate problem that PortsDB aims to solve is to fix incorrect FreeBSD port versions displayed by Repology. Repology uses ports INDEX which is missing some required information. This leads to Repology not being able to distinguish between real versions, and intermediate and made-up versions. PortsDB should allow Repology to solve this problem.