Installing Applications on servers

B

bojan

For the servers especially Web servers, when you install web server, php, mysql, do you compile from vendor source or ports or you use packages?

I like to use source from vendor, it gives me more flexibility and if you manage other OS (Linux) it is little more consistent.

On RPM based or Deb based, do you prefer source or packages?
 
I always use the package manager for the OS I'm installing on. For FreeBSD, it's usually the ports tree, but sometimes I'll use pkg_add. For Debian, it's aptitude/synaptic. For RedHat, it's yum/rpm. For Windows, it's MSI/.exe files.

You really don't want to be installing everything from source, by hand, everytime. That's just wasting time and resources. :) Use the tools at hand, and save yourself some grief when it comes time to upgrade.

We used to do a lot by hand. But it became a maintenance nightmare very quickly (how is that app started again, via init script, manual script, something else?).
 
I host Mumble servers, and I like to build that from the git sources because the port only sticks to releases (as it probably should). Other than that, I build everything from ports.

As far as things like Apache/PHP/etc, I had a friend that used to do that. It was a nightmare when it came to upgrade time. It doesn't give you any extra flexibility really, but I guess I can appreciate wanting to keep things the same over different types of OSes.

The real problems start when people build things like Apache from sources for no decent reason whatsoever, then have problems, and become flamebait in places like #freebsdhelp.
 
I build my own packages from the ports. That way I can turn options on/off and I don't end up with build dependencies on my servers.
 
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