OpenPKG Advent Calendar 2006

Tips & Tricks
Test-Driving OpenPKG Quickly

Study it forever and you'll still wonder.
Fly it once and you'll know.

— Henry Spencer

People often think OpenPKG cannot be tried out easily as its entry barrier is too high because of mandatory registration, complex command lines, required test systems, etc. This is not really true.

Technology Pitch

It is very easy to test-drive OpenPKG: on an arbitrary existing Unix system, without full registration and with just a few commands. Just have a look at the short step-by-step OpenPKG Technology Pitch. It installs Apache/mod_ssl and Lynx through the use of a temporary OpenPKG Registry token, quickly test-drives the results and residue-freely removes everything again.

      # download OpenPKG bootstrap source shell package
      $ wget \
        ftp://ftp.openpkg.org/stable/2/SRC/CORE/openpkg-*.src.sh
      
      # build OpenPKG instance
      sh openpkg-*.src.sh \
         --prefix=/openpkg --tag=openpkg \
         --user=openpkg --group=openpkg
      sh openpkg-*-openpkg.sh
        
      # register instance to access additional packages
      openpkg register --mode=post \
          --user=b230f18e-81bb-11db-9084-0050c2658001  
      
      # build and install Apache and Lynx
      /openpkg/bin/openpkg build \
        -D apache::with_mod_ssl apache lynx | sh
      
      # start Apache and test with Lynx
      /openpkg/bin/openpkg rc apache start
      /openpkg/bin/lynx https://localhost/
      
      # stop Apache and erase OpenPKG instance
      /openpkg/bin/openpkg rc apache stop
      /openpkg/bin/openpkg rpm \
          -e `/openpkg/bin/openpkg rpm -qa`
      
      # remove downloaded and generated package files
      rm -rf /openpkg
      rm -f openpkg-*.src.sh