The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac.
We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” Vs. “unstable” branches, targetting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.5, A.K.A Leopard) and the immediately previous one (10.4, A.K.A. Tiger). There are currently ports in our tree, distributed among different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis.
For information on installing MacPorts please see the installation section of this site and explore the myriad of download options we provide and our base system requirements.
If you run into any problems installing and/or using MacPorts we also have many options to help you, depending on how you wish to get get in touch with us. Other important help resources are our online documentation, A.K.A The MacPorts Guide, and our Trac Wiki server & bug tracker.
Latest MacPorts release:
There are many ways you can get involved with MacPorts and peer users, system administrators & developers alike. Browse over to the “Contact Us” section of our site and:
If on the other hand you are interested in joining The MacPorts Project in any way, then don't hesitate to contact the project's management team, “PortMgr”, to explain your particular interest and present a formal application. We're always looking for more helping hands that can extend and improve our ports tree and documentation, or take MacPorts itself beyond its current limitations and into new areas of the vast software packaging field. We're eager to hear from you!
Browse over to our generous landlord's homepage, Mac OS Forge, for information on other related projects.