Ports collections (or
ports trees, or just
ports) are the sets of
makefiles and
patches provided by the
BSD-based
operating systems,
FreeBSD,
NetBSD, and
OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. They are usually the base of a
package management system, with ports handling package creation and additional tools managing package removal, upgrade, and other tasks. In addition to the BSDs, a few
Linux distributions have implemented similar
infrastructure, including
Gentoo's
Portage,
Arch's
Arch Build System (ABS) and
CRUX's and Void Linux's Ports.