Abstract: This work investigates a safety-guaranteed path-following control framework for an autonomous azimuth tugboat operating in complex port environments, where both untimely static or dynamic obstacles avoidance and external disturbances are present. The proposed approach consists of a safety strategy based on control barrier functions and a trajectory-tracking controller. Firstly, an exponential control barrier function is constructed based on the minimum safe distance, and the corresponding safety constraint is formulated to ensure forward invariance of the safe set. Under the minimum-intervention principle, the nominal guidance command is modified online through a real-time adjustment of the desired yaw-rate reference, thereby satisfying the collision-avoidance constraint with minimal intervention in the nominal guidance command. To achieve accurate path following, a line-of-sight guidance law is employed to generate the desired heading reference, and a dynamic surface control-based thruster azimuth-angle control law is developed to avoid the repeated differentiations typically required in backstepping designs. Furthermore, an adaptive compensation mechanism is incorporated to suppress model uncertainties and bounded environmental perturbations. Current status and prospects of research on marine atmospheric duct characteristics and their applications Finally, MATLAB numerical simulations on the “Jin dian tuo 1” tugboat model, including multiple obstacles and wind-wave-current disturbances, validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of smooth path tracking, robust disturbance rejection, and consistent safety margin maintenance.