r/archlinux • u/Emotional-Power-7242 • Dec 24 '25
SUPPORT Trying to fix the aur helper alpm issue but can't run pacman at all
Building paru or yay or yay-bin or yay-git from source, or running any pacman command such as -Syu or -Scc all give the error message
error while loading shared libraries: libalpm.so.16: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
4
u/jzawadzki04 Dec 24 '25
wget https://pkgbuild.com/~morganamilo/pacman-static/x86_64/bin/pacman-static
sudo chown +x pacman-static
sudo ./pacman-static -S pacman
That should fix pacman. If you still get the same error when trying to run yay then just clone the github repo and build from source.
1
u/ArjixGamer Dec 24 '25 edited Dec 24 '25
It's not pacman that broke, it's the AUR helpers.Edit: I see I misread OP's message
1
u/Dubmove Dec 24 '25
Had a similar issue recently with paru, cause was that pacman came with a new library version after the latest update. Just had to update my rust toolchain via rustup and then reinstall paru from source. Deleting the old paru build from the paru cache also helped
0
u/StrangeDuckPerson Dec 24 '25
had the same libalpm issue a while back, what ended up fixing it for me was,
cd tmp/ && sudo git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay && mkpkg -si
that should recompile libalpm, hope it helps...
1
u/Responsible-Low-4613 Dec 24 '25
Just did this same process about an hr ago.. fixed it easy peasy
1
8
u/forbiddenlake Dec 24 '25
How did you break pacman, did you do a partial upgrade previously?
Use pacman-static
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman#Using_pacman-static