How to reload macports without unload, load

March 8th, 2013

I've been using macports ever since I switched to the macbook pro a couple of years ago. It's a very fine ports collection that uses very straightforward commands to do whatever is it you want to do.

But when you install ports that need to be running to use them (like a webserver or a database server or even php-fpm) there's often a need to stop/start those services. And here's where macports falls short... Macports uses the OSX launchctl command, and only adds individual commands to stop, and then start a service.

This can become tedious:

sudo port unload nginx && sudo port load nginx

Googling this issue I came across this feature request, which illustrates the "problem". Obviously, there's more than one way to skin a cat (and absolutely no reason why you would want to?!)

So here's a simple bash script to join the two commands together.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

SUDO="/usr/bin/sudo"
PORT="/opt/local/bin/port"

if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo "Usage: portreload portname [portname] ...";
    exit;
fi

for p in $@
do
$SUDO $PORT unload $p \
    && $SUDO $PORT load $p \
    && echo "Port $p reloaded";
done

To use it, save the contents to a file called "portreload" (or something else of your choice), save it in your path and make in executable. Then you can do:

portreload nginx

Or even:

portreload nginx mysql5 php54-fpm

And it will output the result:

Port nginx reloaded
Port mysql5 reloaded
Port php54-fpm reloaded

Ramon de la Fuente

Pointy haired boss