MacPorts on multiple Macs

[Jeremy Lavergne]

> I suppose there isn't a "right way" since MacPorts is not designed to be used like that. What you describe should work, but it would only be a one-time copy from machine A to B (C, D, etc.). If you later install additional software on A, you'd then have to install it separately on B (C, D, etc.). Unless you look into using rsync or something to sync them up.

It's roughly the same effort to copy a fresh installation than it is to run the installer on each machine, so why not do it the expected way?

> Now that we have pre-compiled binaries, there's less need for such things. Just install MacPorts separately on each machine and let it download the binaries. Unfortunately we don't have binaries for Mountain Lion yet.
> 
> It seems to me like it should be possible to somehow instruct MacPorts to look for binaries that have already been installed on another local computer. I don't know how to do that though.

You could setup a www server on one of the machines to offer up software available in
/opt/local/var/macports/software, which is where the binary archives live.

You then add that machine to
/opt/local/etc/macports/archive_sites.conf

Note that you'll need to setup a signing key for the packages. Some helpful instructions are available on the MacPorts site:
https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/ShareArchives2
https://trac.macports.org/wiki/archives