Manually installing packages from the command line / ssh / console

[luckman212]

Today I had a far-away unit on 2.4.3-p1 running just fine. I needed Cron on there to schedule some gateway monitoring scripts.

Here's what popped up:

Ugh. I did NOT feel like rolling the dice on a Friday afternoon and risking having to drive out and rescue this thing. 2.4.4 hasn't had a good track record of successful field upgrades for me so far.

Long story short, I gave this a try via ssh and it worked like a charm:

# pkg install pfSense-pkg-Cron

Cron package is now up and running, and I can enjoy my Friday afternoon
Posting in case this helps anyone, posting here since most of the threads I found when I searched for "manually install package" were 2-7 years old...

[jimp]

Had that pulled in some other dependency incompatible with 2.4.3 you would have just shot your own foot, though. I wouldn't advise anyone do that. :-)

[luckman212]

Yikes. Ok I guess I dodged a bullet on this one then. Any way to tell via CLI whether such a dependency exists?

[jimp]

Well as long as you don't use -y it will still ask for confirmation after printing the list of changes so it's not awful, but still someone could absentmindedly hit y not realizing the list of changes was bad.

You could run pkg install -n blah and read the output to know for sure in a safe way.