How to keep your FreeBSD box up to date

Here is a quick but time-consuming way of keeping your ports up to date. First we will install portaudit to see what ports need upgrading because of vulnerability issues. Than we will install portupgrade which is a program for upgrading your system.

Portaudit

portaudit provides a system to check if installed ports are listed in a
database of published security vulnerabilities.

cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portaudit
make install clean
portaudit -Fda



Portupgrade

Portupgrade is a tool to upgrade installed packages via ports or
packages.  You can upgrade installed packages without having to
reinstall depending or dependent packages.  It can automatically trace
dependency chains up and down upgrading packages recursively.

cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade
make install clean

Let's now update the ports collection using the built in portsnap.

portsnap fetch
portsnap update



After your ports collection update is completed you should run the following command and building a new database for the portupgrade program. Beware as this takes a LOT.

portsdb -Uu

The actual upgrading is done with:

portupgrade -arR

By the way to see what packages are outdated type at the command prompt:
pkg_version -l "<"

That's it. You should now have an up to date system. All you need to do now is automate this task by adding all the commands in a shell file and throwing it at cron.