Steps to Install the IPKG Package Manager and Third-Party Community Packages on Synology

Steps to Install the IPKG Package Manager and Third-Party Community Packages on Synology

The environment used here is a Synology DS1517+ running DSM 6.2.3. Although Synology is built on Linux, unlike public distributions such as Red Hat or Ubuntu, Synology does not provide a package manager like yum or apt-get in addition to its official graphical package center. To install common Linux tools such as nano from the command line, you need to install the third-party community package manager ipkg. The steps are as follows:

• Open Synology Package Center, click Settings in the upper-right corner, and select Package Sources.
• Click Add to add a community package source. Here we use the cphub source, though you can add other sources as well. The Name field can be anything, and the Location field should be http://www.cphub.net.
• After adding it, close the page. The package sources will refresh automatically, and under the Community menu you will see a list of third-party packages from the community.
• Find and install Easy Bootstrap Installer by QTip, then install the iPKGui package. Once this is done, the IPKG package manager is installed.
• The executable IPKG binary is located in /opt/bin/. After logging into the Synology NAS via SSH, you can run it using the full path: /opt/bin/ipkg. You can also add it to the system path temporarily with the following command: export PATH="$PATH:/opt/bin".
• However, the command above only adds the ipkg path temporarily. To make it permanent, you can use the following commands to install the nano editor and then edit the system path:

sudo /opt/bin/ipkg update
sudo /opt/bin/ipkg install nano
sudo /opt/bin/nano /etc/profile

The commands above use the ipkg package manager to install nano and edit the /etc/profile file. In that file, find the system path line similar to the following:

PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/syno/sbin:/usr/syno/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin

Add :/opt/bin to the end of that string (important: include the colon). Then save the file. In nano, press CTRL + O and then Enter to save the document, and press CTRL + X to exit the editor.

Run the following command to make the change take effect:

source /etc/profile

You can then check whether the ipkg path has been added to the system path with:

echo $PATH | tr ":" "\n" | nl

Now you can use the ipkg command directly from the command line.