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AUR Helper

An AUR helper is a tool that automates the process of installing packages from the Arch User Repository.

It does this by automating the following tasks:

  • search the AUR for published packages
  • resolve dependencies for AUR packages
  • retrieval and build of AUR packages
  • show user comments
  • submission of AUR packages

AUR packages are distributed in the form of PKGBUILDs that contain information on how the package needs to be built, what dependencies is needs and all the usual metadata associated with every other Arch Linux package.

Arch Wiki has a list of AUR helpers with comparison tables

Installation

The installation procedure for any AUR helper is largely the same, as they are all published on the AUR itself.

Building packages from the AUR manually will at minimum require the base-devel and git packages:

pacman -S base-devel git

ATTENTION: If you'rere currently logged in as the root user, you need to switch to a regular user profile with su username, as makepkg will not allow you to run it as root.

Change to a temporary directory, clone the AUR helper of your choice with git, change into the newly created directory and call makepkg to build and install it, e.g. yay:

cd /tmp
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay
cd yay
makepkg -si

makepkg will prompt you to install any missing dependencies for your chosen AUR helper, i.e. go for yay, rust for paru, etc.

Prevent build of -debug packages

By default, makepkg is configured to also generate debug symbol packages. This affects all AUR helpers. To turn this behavior off, edit /etc/makepkg.conf, look for the OPTIONS array and either remove the debug option or prepend it with !:

                                                               here
                                                                ▼
OPTIONS=(strip docs !libtool !staticlibs emptydirs zipman purge !debug lto)
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