Instar Mac OS

From the Apple menu  in the corner of your screen, choose About This Mac. You should see the macOS name, such as macOS Big Sur, followed by its version number. If you need to know the build number as well, click the version number to see it. Which macOS version is the latest? Recovery Mode is the special salvation of the Mac that first launched with OS X 10.7 Lion. It creates a temporary boot partition that allows you to access certain things on your computer that you might not be able to if your system froze or crashed. It is the easiest way to install a fresh copy of an operating system.

These advanced steps are primarily for system administrators and others who are familiar with the command line. You don't need a bootable installer to upgrade macOS or reinstall macOS, but it can be useful when you want to install on multiple computers without downloading the installer each time.

What you need to create a bootable installer

  • A USB flash drive or other secondary volume formatted as Mac OS Extended, with at least 14GB of available storage
  • A downloaded installer for macOS Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, or El Capitan

Download macOS

  • Download: macOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, or macOS High Sierra
    These download to your Applications folder as an app named Install macOS [version name]. If the installer opens after downloading, quit it without continuing installation. To get the correct installer, download from a Mac that is using macOS Sierra 10.12.5 or later, or El Capitan 10.11.6. Enterprise administrators, please download from Apple, not a locally hosted software-update server.
  • Download: OS X El Capitan
    This downloads as a disk image named InstallMacOSX.dmg. On a Mac that is compatible with El Capitan, open the disk image and run the installer within, named InstallMacOSX.pkg. It installs an app named Install OS X El Capitan into your Applications folder. You will create the bootable installer from this app, not from the disk image or .pkg installer.

Use the 'createinstallmedia' command in Terminal

  1. Connect the USB flash drive or other volume that you're using for the bootable installer.
  2. Open Terminal, which is in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.
  3. Type or paste one of the following commands in Terminal. These assume that the installer is in your Applications folder, and MyVolume is the name of the USB flash drive or other volume you're using. If it has a different name, replace MyVolume in these commands with the name of your volume.

Instarmac Instant Road Repair Pre-mix

Big Sur:*

Catalina:*

Mojave:*

High Sierra:*

El Capitan:

* If your Mac is using macOS Sierra or earlier, include the --applicationpath argument and installer path, similar to the way this is done in the command for El Capitan.

Instarmac


After typing the command:

  1. Press Return to enter the command.
  2. When prompted, type your administrator password and press Return again. Terminal doesn't show any characters as you type your password.
  3. When prompted, type Y to confirm that you want to erase the volume, then press Return. Terminal shows the progress as the volume is erased.
  4. After the volume is erased, you may see an alert that Terminal would like to access files on a removable volume. Click OK to allow the copy to proceed.
  5. When Terminal says that it's done, the volume will have the same name as the installer you downloaded, such as Install macOS Big Sur. You can now quit Terminal and eject the volume.

Use the bootable installer

Determine whether you're using a Mac with Apple silicon, then follow the appropriate steps:

Apple silicon

  1. Plug the bootable installer into a Mac that is connected to the internet and compatible with the version of macOS you're installing.
  2. Turn on your Mac and continue to hold the power button until you see the startup options window, which shows your bootable volumes.
  3. Select the volume containing the bootable installer, then click Continue.
  4. When the macOS installer opens, follow the onscreen instructions.

Intel processor

  1. Plug the bootable installer into a Mac that is connected to the internet and compatible with the version of macOS you're installing.
  2. Press and hold the Option (Alt) ⌥ key immediately after turning on or restarting your Mac.
  3. Release the Option key when you see a dark screen showing your bootable volumes.
  4. Select the volume containing the bootable installer. Then click the up arrow or press Return.
    If you can't start up from the bootable installer, make sure that the External Boot setting in Startup Security Utility is set to allow booting from external media.
  5. Choose your language, if prompted.
  6. Select Install macOS (or Install OS X) from the Utilities window, then click Continue and follow the onscreen instructions.

Learn more

A bootable installer doesn't download macOS from the internet, but it does require an internet connection to get firmware and other information specific to the Mac model.

For information about the createinstallmedia command and the arguments you can use with it, make sure that the macOS installer is in your Applications folder, then enter the appropriate path in Terminal:

Instarmac Os

Quickstart

  1. Install Xcode and the Xcode Command Line Tools
  2. Agree to Xcode license in Terminal: sudo xcodebuild -license
  3. Install MacPorts for your version of the Mac operating system:

Installing MacPorts

MacPorts version 2.6.4 is available in various formats for download and installation (note, if you are upgrading to a new major release of macOS, see the migration info page):

  • “pkg” installers for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra, for use with the macOS Installer. This is the simplest installation procedure that most users should follow after meeting the requirements listed below. Installers for legacy platforms Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger are also available.
  • In source form as either a tar.bz2 package or a tar.gz one for manual compilation, if you intend to customize your installation in any way.
  • Git clone of the unpackaged sources, if you wish to follow MacPorts development.
  • The selfupdate target of the port(1) command, for users who already have MacPorts installed and wish to upgrade to a newer release.

Checksums for our packaged downloads are contained in the corresponding checksums file.

The public key to verify the detached GPG signatures can be found under the attachments section on jmr's wiki page. (Direct Link).

Please note that in order to install and run MacPorts on macOS, your system must have installations of the following components:

  1. Apple's Xcode Developer Tools (version 12.2 or later for Big Sur, 11.3 or later for Catalina, 10.0 or later for Mojave, 9.0 or later for High Sierra, 8.0 or later for Sierra, 7.0 or later for El Capitan, 6.1 or later for Yosemite, 5.0.1 or later for Mavericks, 4.4 or later for Mountain Lion, 4.1 or later for Lion, 3.2 or later for Snow Leopard, or 3.1 or later for Leopard), found at the Apple Developer site, on your Mac operating system installation CDs/DVD, or in the Mac App Store. Using the latest available version that will run on your OS is highly recommended, except for Snow Leopard where the last free version, 3.2.6, is recommended.

  2. Apple's Command Line Developer Tools can be installed on recent OS versions by running this command in the Terminal:

    Older versions are found at the Apple Developer site, or they can be installed from within Xcode back to version 4. Users of Xcode 3 or earlier can install them by ensuring that the appropriate option(s) are selected at the time of Xcode's install ('UNIX Development', 'System Tools', 'Command Line Tools', or 'Command Line Support').

  3. Xcode 4 and later users need to first accept the Xcode EULA by either launching Xcode or running:
  4. (Optional) The X11 windowing environment for ports that depend on the functionality it provides to run. You have multiple choices for an X11 server:
    • Install the xorg-server port from MacPorts (recommended).
    • The XQuartz Project provides a complete X11 release for macOS including server and client libraries and applications.
    • Apple's X11.app is provided by the “X11 User” package on older OS versions. It is always installed on Lion, and is an optional installation on your system CDs/DVD with previous OS versions.

macOS Package (.pkg) Installer

The easiest way to install MacPorts on a Mac is by downloading the pkg or dmg for Big Sur, Catalina, Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, El Capitan, Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard or Tiger and running the system's Installer by double-clicking on the pkg contained therein, following the on-screen instructions until completion.

This procedure will place a fully-functional and default MacPorts installation on your host system, ready for usage. If needed your shell configuration files will be adapted by the installer to include the necessary settings to run MacPorts and the programs it installs, but you may need to open a new shell for these changes to take effect.

The MacPorts “selfupdate” command will also be run for you by the installer to ensure you have our latest available release and the latest revisions to the “Portfiles” that contain the instructions employed in the building and installation of ports. After installation is done, it is recommended that you run this step manually on a regular basis to to keep your MacPorts system always current:

At this point you should be ready to enjoy MacPorts!

Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.

Source Installation

If on the other hand you decide to install MacPorts from source, there are still a couple of things you will need to do after downloading the tarball before you can start installing ports, namely compiling and installing MacPorts itself:

  1. “cd” into the directory where you downloaded the package and run “tar xjvf MacPorts-2.6.4.tar.bz2” or “tar xzvf MacPorts-2.6.4.tar.gz”, depending on whether you downloaded the bz2 tarball or the gz one, respectively.
  2. Build and install the recently unpacked sources:
    • cd MacPorts-2.6.4
    • ./configure && make && sudo make install
    Optionally:
    • cd ../
    • rm -rf MacPorts-2.6.4*

These steps need to be perfomed from an administrator account, for which “sudo” will ask the password upon installation. This procedure will install a pristine MacPorts system and, if the optional steps are taken, remove the as of now unnecessary MacPorts-2.6.4 source directory and corresponding tarball.

To customize your installation you should read the output of “./configure --help more” and pass the appropriate options for the settings you wish to tweak to the configuration script in the steps detailed above.

You will need to manually adapt your shell's environment to work with MacPorts and your chosen installation prefix (the value passed to configure's --prefix flag, defaulting to /opt/local):

  • Add ${prefix}/bin and ${prefix}/sbin to the start of your PATH environment variable so that MacPorts-installed programs take precedence over system-provided programs of the same name.
  • If a standard MANPATH environment variable already exists (that is, one that doesn't contain any empty components), add the ${prefix}/share/man path to it so that MacPorts-installed man pages are found by your shell.
  • For Tiger and earlier only, add an appropriate X11 DISPLAY environment variable to run X11-dependent programs, as Leopard takes care of this requirement on its own.

Lastly, you need to synchronize your installation with the MacPorts rsync server:

Upon completion MacPorts will be ready to install ports!

It is recommended to run the above command on a regular basis to keep your installation current. Type “man port” at the command line prompt and/or browse over to our Guide to find out more information about using MacPorts. Help is also available.

Git Sources

If you are developer or a user with a taste for the bleeding edge and wish for the latest changes and feature additions, you may acquire the MacPorts sources through git. See the Guide section on installing from git.

Purpose-specific branches are also available at the https://github.com/macports/macports-base/branches url.

Alternatively, if you'd simply like to view the git repository without checking it out, you can do so via the GitHub web interface.

Selfupdate

If you already have MacPorts installed and have no restrictions to use the rsync networking protocol (tcp port 873 by default), the easiest way to upgrade to our latest available release, 2.6.4, is by using the selfupdate target of the port(1) command. This will both update your ports tree (by performing a sync operation) and rebuild your current installation if it's outdated, preserving your customizations, if any.

Other Platforms

Running on platforms other than macOS is not the main focus of The MacPorts Project, so remaining cross-platform is not an actively-pursued development goal. Nevertheless, it is not an actively-discouraged goal either and as a result some experimental support does exist for other POSIX-compliant platforms such as *BSD and GNU/Linux.

The full list of requirements to run MacPorts on these other platforms is as follows (we assume you have the basics such as GCC and X11):

  • Tcl (8.4 or 8.5), with threads.
  • mtree for directory hierarchy.
  • rsync for syncing the ports.
  • cURL for downloading distfiles.
  • SQLite for the port registry.
  • GNUstep (Base), for Foundation (optional, can be disabled via configure args).
  • OpenSSL for signature verification, and optionally for checksums. libmd may be used instead for checksums.

Normally you must install from source or from an git checkout to run MacPorts on any of these platforms.

Help

Help on a wide variety of topics is also available in the project Guide and through our Trac portal should you run into any problems installing and/or using MacPorts. Of particular relevance are the installation & usage sections of the former and the FAQ section of the Wiki, where we keep track of questions frequently fielded on our mailing lists.

If any of these resources do not answer your questions or if you need any kind of extended support, there are many ways to contact us!