Using Your Own Archives

MacPorts recently added the ability to verify archives when archivemode is enabled. Signing archives is basically a requirement now. This page will serve as a guide showing how to do this.

Create Keys

The first step (also detailed in ${prefix}/etc/macports/pubkeys.conf​) is to make keys to sign your archives.

To distribute archives of your own, you need a key pair generated like so:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out privkey.pem 2048
openssl rsa -in privkey.pem -pubout -out pubkey.pem

Be sure to add this key to your ssh keyring or you'll get asked for the password each time it's used. Another alternative is it save it as an unencrypted key, like so:

openssl rsa -in privkey.pem -out privkey.pem.bare

Sign Packages

Then sign the archives like this:

openssl dgst -ripemd160 -sign privkey.pem -out archive.tbz2.rmd160 archive.tbz2

If you have lots of archives to sign, this can be done via a for loop in your shell. Here I use bash:

for i in *tbz2; do openssl dgst -ripemd160 -sign ~/.ssh/privkey.pem.bare -out $i.rmd160 $i; done

Note that this saves the signatures along side the archives, by simply using .rmd160 as a suffix. This is what MacPorts presently expects.

Configure MacPorts

Now we need to add your key to MacPorts. This is done in two places:

• save copy of public key
• add path to this copy in pubkeys.conf

I saved my key as /opt/local/etc/macports/snc.pub for simplicity. To avoid naming collisions I suggest adding all custom keys to just one file.

Try It

Your archives are now signed and MacPorts should be configured to recognize your signature. Try it out!