Trouble setting up package repo

stephenw10

Hi All,
After hitting a steep learning curve on several occasions over the last few months (and rolling back down it!) I finally got stuck into setting up my own package repository so I can play with some packages.
It's taken me a ridiculous amount of time to get where I am (which is no where!) but now I seem to be completely stuck.
I'm using the same FreeBSD 8.1 machine I have setup for compiling to host the repo. I have installed apache 2.2 and php5.2. That took ages! ::) I have installed pear and the xml_rpc package for pear but when I go to <myserver>/pkg_tester.php I get:

Fatal error: Class 'PEAR' not found in /usr/local/www/apache22/data/pfSense/xmlrpc_client.inc on line 41

Any thoughts? As you can probably guess this is way outside my experience.

Also the wiki article says:

Beware, this repository is very large, and will consume a lot of disk space.

However when I cloned it from github it was around 80MB. Is that right?

Thanks for any comments. :)

Steve</myserver>

stephenw10

Ok I fixed that error. I had to install the php-xml extension.
Then I got another error which was resolved by installing the php-pcre extension. All good now though. ;D

Steve

tommyboy180

Awesome. We should get a public (or at least friend invite only) repo for beta or under development packages. That way we can help with packages and dev faster.

stephenw10

Good idea.
After I've finished botching this install I don't think I'd want to host anything publicly on it! ::)

Steve

jimp

The wiki article here:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Creating_Your_Own_Package_Repository

Was written before when the repo was on rcs.pfsense.org. Over the years people have checked in all kinds of binaries into the repo, and they don't belong there. Only the PHP/xml/scripts belong in there. So when we moved to github a lot of that data that shouldn't have been in the repo was purged (lots of .tgz/.tbz files add up quickly in size!) and moved to where it should be on files.pfsense.org.

As a consequence of that purge, the size has reduced quite a lot. It used to be nearly 1GB in size between the data and the history in the .git directory. It's still nearly 200MB.

pfSense-packages$ du -k -d 1
88258   ./.git
110476  ./config
198970  .

When developing packages, especially making new ones, having your own repo is quite handy. It's even better if you make your own fork of the packages repo on github and work with that on your server as you make changes. Then once you have it ready you can just submit a merge request there.