FreshPorts has seven databases. Each website has its own: dvl, dev, test, stage, foo, bar, and production on RDS. They are all built from the database-schema repo. They should all be the same. Today I decided to find out if they are. They mostly are. The repo is not. I’m documenting this so I have
Database schema reconciliation Read More »
Earlier this month a botnet found its way through the FreshPorts search page and kept the production database at 100% CPU. Over the following days I limited search to logged-in users, made a series of database changes, and on 17 October deployed a release with several search fixes. This post looks at what all that
FreshPorts October speed-up Read More »
This is not yet deployed and is still in test. When a date appears here, it has been deployed to production. Every port page on FreshPorts has a line reading People watching this port, also watch: followed by up to five links. Until now, that list was calculated every time the page was built. For
Precomputing “People watching this port, also watch” Read More »
This applies to upcoming webserver changes. When you see a date in this paragraph, it has been deployed. The search gate was meant to keep bots away from the search page while letting people in without a login. A botnet got past it, and the database ran at 100% CPU until search was restricted to
Deterring bots, but letting people in Read More »
These notes are for the next website release: 2.16.4 Earlier this week, the production database ran at 100% CPU. Turning off searches for visitors who are not logged in brought it down to 22%, and then to 10%. This post covers what was found, and the changes being deployed to fix it. What was found
Search improvements Read More »
The past thirteen days have been among the busiest in FreshPorts history: twenty-two pull requests merged, seven people contributing, and changes to almost every page on the site. Here are the highlights. FreshPorts speaks your language FreshPorts can now be translated (#678), and five translations are ready: Deutsch, by Stefan Eßer Français (Canada), by Marc
Thirteen busy days: FreshPorts now speaks your language, fits your phone, and more Read More »
freshports-www-2.16.1 requires some database changes. This post outlines the updates on one host. Since starting this post, there’s been a few updates, and now I’m deploying 2.16.2.6 This post was composed and amended over several upgrades. The inconsistencies you see in hostnames and prompts are related to that. Stop processing [14:59 stage-ingress01 dvl ~] %
Deploying freshports-www-2.16.1 Read More »
Yesterday, the logs started complaining about riscv64. Nothing was broken, but it was noisy, and noise hides the stuff that matters. I worked through this with Claude, which also helped me write this post. What I saw Every hour, FreshPorts checks pkg.freebsd.org for new package builds. At 13:00 UTC on 10 October 2026, this showed
riscv64 has packages, but only pkgbase Read More »
For my own notes later, when I wonder why this thing is readonly. This was generated by Claude. FreshPorts moved from Subversion to git on 5 October 2026. The Subversion repository it came from, freshports-1, should never change again, but the Subversion server also hosts other repositories which are still in use. So the server
How I set the old subversion repo to readonly Read More »
I have attempted this process twice before. My thanks to those who helped me. I never completed your work. I appreciate your assistance and apologize that I never completed my part. Tonight, I resorted to Claude for help. This is a summary. FreshPorts has kept its code in version control since its first commit on
Converting the last FreshPorts subversion repos to git Read More »