Starting again from base system

[balanga]

After building and installing numerous packages, I seem to have created a bit of a mess so would like to start again from the base build.

How do I delete all built ports and installed pkgs?

 

[asteriskRoss]

The ports-mgmt/portmaster tool has a procedure for doing this, described in the portmaster(8) man page. Look in the examples section at "Using portmaster to do a complete reinstallation of all your ports". If you simply want to remove all ports and not reinstall then you can stop before reinstalling ports-mgmnt/portmaster.

 

[protocelt]

The ports-mgmt/portmaster tool has a procedure for doing this, described in the portmaster(8) man page. Look in the examples section at "Using portmaster to do a complete reinstallation of all your ports". If you simply want to remove all ports and not reinstall then you can stop before reinstalling ports-mgmnt/portmaster.

I think that will only work for FreeBSD versions < 10-* due to the old pkg tools being removed in 10-RELEASE if I'm not mistaken.The portmaster(8) man page section might need to be updated to reflect the new pkg framework if so.

 

[wblock@]

To delete all packages, it's just pkg delete -a.

An updated portmaster(8) procedure for reinstalling all ports can be found in the diff on bug 191166.

 

[Beastie]

The fastest and cleanest way: rm -fr /var/db/pkg /var/db/ports /usr/ports /usr/local

Note 1: remove the paths you don't want to clean (duh).
Note 2: be very careful when you type the command; you don't want spaces in the wrong places.

 

[wblock@]

Yikes! I like to keep /usr/local/etc, generally there is quite a bit of work there.

 

[balanga]

If I delete mysql-server, how do I delete any databases which may have been created previously?

 

[junovitch@]

If I delete mysql-server, how do I delete any databases which may have been created previously?

I believe MySQL databases are normally under the directory /var/db/mysql.