Automating Port Installs in Freebsd

Happy New Year Everyone, last year i did not do a good job in blogging and keeping things posted but  year im looking to do a better job with this blog site. Well i  Just spent most of my day messing around with freebsd and talking with a few people on irc who stated that they were having issue installing ports without have to answer any of the menu based questions. so i figured i would do a quick tutorial on automating the installation of ports of a freebsd system.  Well enough talking on this end lets get to it. 

Step1.  im going to assume that you already have the ports tree installed on the system, If you do not have the port tree installed you can do so with the following commands 

portsnap fetch 

portsnap extract 

for more information regarding the portsnap command please check out the man pages.

Step2. cd /usr/ports/mail/postfix  (or whatever port you are trying to install) 

Step3.  make config ( this will create a configuration file in the /var/db/ports/postfix directory) 

Step4. modify the config file if there is one and make all the changes that you would like to that file.

Step5. Once you are satisfied with your config file run the following command 

cd /usr/ports/mail/postfix; env BATCH=yes make install clean 

Note: This is the more cleaner way of automating port installation rather than putting the "BATCH = yes" into the /etc/make.conf file.

NOTE: This procedure has been tested on freebsd 8.2 so as far as i know this should work on other versions of freebsd.

Well thats all for right now. I'm to go watch a movie i hope someone gets something out of this tutorial.