If you have performed a fresh install of Mac OS X Lion or if you plan to install MacPort after having installed Lion, you will soon realize that the MacPort team does not distribute (yet) a Lion installer.  Snow Leopard installer will fail when detecting Lion.

Question is therefore : how to install MacPort on Lion ?  Answer : install it from the sources.

It might be scarry, but it is very easy, here are the details.

Preriquisite : install Aple’s development tool XCode.  It is freely available from the App Store (be patient it is a 3.5 Gb download)

• Open a terminal
• create a directory for the sources

mkdir macport.sources

• Fetch the sources

cd macport.sources
sudo svn checkout http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk

• Compile

cd trunk/base
sudo ./configure --enable-readline
sudo make install

• Install

sudo make distclean

• Change your profile to include MacPort in the PATH

vi $HOME/.profile

#!/usr/bin/bash
# MacPort
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

• Source your profile to include the changes

. $HOME/.profile

That’s it ! Easy as I promised.

You can now search for package with

sudo port list | grep <your search>

and install packages with

sudo port install <package name>

Enjoy !