AUR Helper

An AUR helper is a tool that simplifiesautomates the process of procuring extrainstalling packages from the Arch User Repository.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

yayInstallation

InstallThe 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 packages,and git and go:packages:

pacman -S base-devel git
go

SwitchATTENTION: If you'rere currently logged in as the root user, you need to anyswitch to a regular user:

user

profile with su sebinusername, as makepkg

 will not allow you to run it as root.

MakeChange sureto we'rea intemporary directory, clone the user'sAUR homehelper directory:

of

your choice with cdgit, 

change

Createinto athe newnewly created directory and changecall intomakepkg it:

to

mkdirbuild gitand &&install cdit, git

Clone the AUR package repo fore.g. yay:

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

Change into the newly cloned repository:

cd yay

Build the package and install it:

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)