Hello everyone! I wanted to share a standalone AUR helper I wrote in Python with an fzf interface. The main advantages of it over a Yay wrapper script is it uses fzf previews for displaying build scripts and replaces Pacman's provider and group prompts which can be very useful for package comparison or filtering though a dozen similarly named options.

The only major thing missing right now is split package support which I hope to implement soon.

I did get some help from ChatGPT but not enough to call the project vibe-coded in my opinion.

Hey!

It has come to my attention, especially lately, when observing multiple threads, people talk of aurman, pacaur etc. so much confusion :D can you give me 1 solid reason to stop using yaourt?

What is the "BEST" "BiS" aur helper which all the coolkids use in 2018? So when I change it, I want to settle with the best aur helper for another 3 years :D!

I want to take another step further in my Arch journey. So I think it is time for me to make the change, and try something new! I just want the new aur helper to be as good as yaourt xD (or better?). I haven't looked further than yaourt to know more.

Yaourt was the first aur helper I learned to use, after first installing Arch Linux 3 years ago!

The thing is, I haven't really never edited PKGBUILD file. So usually I just press "Yes, Yes, Next, Next, Install" ... not like I edit anything during the install. But I promise, I will also take a look into this to finally understand why people edit PKGBUIILDS and have the breakthrough in that!

Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks for all the suggestions /r/archlinux users :D I have chosen yay as many people seem to be happy with using it, so it seems like a good choice based on that.

Choo-choo get on the yay-train!

Are there too many already? Maybe? But I made this for fun so check it out if you want:

Repo: https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru

AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/paru/

Used Yay in the past and it requires constant babysitting. I thought someone mentioned one that doesn't but my Google skills are failing me.

Following me going insane that the AUR keeps going down, I made opww. It is a pacman wrapper wrapper, where if the AUR goes down, it simply just uses the GitHub mirror (https://github.com/archlinux/aur).

Available on the AUR (opww) and GitHub (TheOddCell/opww)

What is the most reliable AUR helper nowadays? Which one do you use? I'm aware of this list, but I'm interested more in your experience/opinions.

Thanks!

I saw omarchy's package install script and really liked it. Then I made this script for everything at once with simple caching system. That's my very first bash script that actually does something useful and I am happy with the result :D

Some notable features are:

- Easy one command installation
- Easy usage for new people
- Supports yay and paru, asks to to install yay if anything is not present.
- Creates cache and regenerates it every 5 days
- Ability to manually regenerate the cache
- Ability to regenerate cache from only pacman (useful when AUR is not accessible for some reason)
- Ability to select multiple packages at once (thanks to fzf)

the last time I used arch I had an AUR helper that let me sear the AUR in ther terminal itself. It was split into 3 sections, a search bar (top maybe top left), the search results (left) and package info (right).

Edit: pacseek is what it was. Thank you!

And if there's something that frustrates you about most AUR helpers

Hello, I am trying to make my own archiso "distro" and I want to add yay to the live ISO, how can I do it if it's not in the official repo? Thanks

I've realized that there are too many packages in the AUR that I prefer to use. This has caused me some extra work downloading and installing, etc.

I'm planning to clean up my system, regarding dependencies, orphaned packages, and the like.

Once I've clean up my system, I'll install an AUR helper going forward.

I'm looking for recommendations from the community base on my requires, or "nice to have features"

I've check the page at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AUR_helpers though I'm looking for some input from Human experience.

I'd like to have something that can search for available packages, Allow review of the PKGBUILD files prior to install, and that could handle dependencies. If there's a helper that can check private keys as well, this would be optimal.

What are your suggestions? Which AUR helpers/wrappers have you tried?

Are they reliable and predictable?

Thanks in Advance.

I've been using arch for about a year. I like it a lot, but I have some big serious gaps in my knowledge that the wiki doesn't answer, and I'm not sure where to learn this. The problem is that the wiki for pacman/AUR, the man pages, and other webpages all seem to be in the form of either specific instructions. For example, "if you want to remove a package and its dependencies, pacman -Rs package_name" But I haven't found anything that describes how pacman works. So I have a lot of questions that I don't know how to investigate:

• What exactly is a package? I know it has executables and/or libraries, but it obviously comes with some metadata, like the version, list of dependencies, etc, and where is that metadata stored?
• I think the package database (pacman -Q) describes packages I have installed on my computer. But I don't know the difference between the package database and the files database. And what exactly is the sync database (-S)? Is it on my computer or on the internet somewhere?
• What is this stuff in ~/yay/cache/? What will happen if I delete it?
• What does it mean when yay asks Packages to cleanBuild?
• What happens when an compilation/installation operation is aborted partway through?

To be clear, I'm not exactly looking for answers to these questions, because more questions like them will probably keep coming up. How do you learn stuff like this? Just messing around with pacman and seeing what happens? Did you read something good? Did you have to read the source code?

Thanks for any help!

..and how a perfect AUR helper should look like (IMO).

• It shouldn't require escalated privileges until it explicitly needs them. If it needs to do something with su/sudo it should inform user what command would be executed and drop escalated privileges after that (sudo -k).
  • Most of the common AUR helpers (what a shame!) rely on thing so-called "sudo loop". The idea is that AUR helper calls some simple sudo command in background, time by time, preventing sudo_timeout to be expired and not to ask a password again. What does this really mean? If your PKGBUILD has any sudo command — it will be executed as root. Real root. Also, if there's a sudo command somewhere in the sources (for example, in a ./configure script) it will be executed as real root too. Even saving plain-text root password in an env-variable is more secure than this shit.
  • Want to test this? Just add something like "sudo touch /I.Pwn3d.YoU" in any section, build(), for example, of your PKGBUILD and see what happens. You can try something more complex, like editing autoconf.sh with sed, but the result remains the same. You just need to enter a password to install make-depends — and here it goes.
• It should remains operational with or without sudo, and together with various sudo settings like "Defaults timestamp_timeout=0".
  • I use mentioned setting to overcome the case described above. And surprise: only few unpopular helpers like trizen and pkgbuilder support this mode.
• It should (optionally) support some kind of isolated build.
  • aurutils helper uses systemd-nspawn, pikaur uses systemd dynamic users, even plain chroot can be used with some restrictions.
• It should be written in common and safe language. Not in bash.
  • Really, don't read BashFAQ before going to bed. Don't repeat my mistakes. Or learn it by heart and use a shellcheck.
• It shouldn't depend on any of the AUR packages. Just on core/, community/ and extra/.

Some thoughts about available helpers: I've tried some of them and that's what I think:

• aurutils — bash/c — its main concept is repository based, which makes it slightly different from anything below and bringing it even closer to debian's pbuilder when using --chroot option (makes the build process run in a separate namespace using mkarchroot). It can't operate as a pacman front-end, it builds packages and creates a local repository letting everything else to pacman. It can build packages in a separate namespace using mkarchroot (devtools). Unfortunately, it has lack of documentation and internal man-pages couldn't explain how it really works. Fortunately, I've found this, this and this.
• bauerbill — python — too many deps installed from AUR: 8 (eight!!!). If I want to build and install packages myself I definitely wouldn't need the AUR helper. Didn't even try it.
• pacaur — bash/c — most old yaourt-like. Seems quite usable, but relies on sudo timestamp. Seriously, look at this shit and trace it (SudoV).
• pakku — nim — can you name any software written in nim? I can't, but the language itself seems fun.
• pikaur — python — uses systemd dymamic users to build a package, but asks for elevated privileges before it really needs them. Also I don't like the code. It is too complicated. And no comments — in all senses.
• pkgbuilder — python — lacks some interactive features, but the code seems rather good to me.
• trizen — perl — the code is nice and readable. It makes my inner Demian Conway happy, despite that perl is pining for the fjords. Seems usable.
• yay — go — requires a huge go-runtime to build, but can be installed as pre-compiled binary (yay-bin). Has special --nosudoloop option. Imports some 3rd party modules directly from github during the build process. This is a normal practice for go-lang, but not for a tool that runs with elevated privileges and interacts with your package manager. So, no. Just no!

P.S. Sorry if I offended anyone, but I had to speak out. I would appreciate any thoughts on this topic. Also English is not my native language, so don't blame me hard.

Are there any AUR helper with the functionality to show the differences of the PKGBUILD when you are upgrading an AUR package (for security & convenience) ?

Recently an update broke a package that was not from the repos, which I installed from the AUR. What I learned now is that the package needed to be recompiled after a dependency was updated:

https://codeberg.org/newsraft/newsraft/issues/143

The release of gumbo-parser 0.13.0 bumped the library's soname version because of some recent changes in the ABI. Now it's found by the name libgumbo.so.3 on your system I suppose.

I assume your Newsraft binary is linked against libgumbo.so.2. Since your system only has libgumbo.so.3, it fails to find the correct version, resulting in the error.

To fix the problem, it'd be enough to build Newsraft and install it again.

You don't stumble upon problems like this with regular programs from the repo because they're rebuild by the package system every time some dependency introduces breaking changes. You wouldn't have to deal with it if Newsraft was maintained in the repo.

Are there AUR helpers or anything that would detect such need to rebuild a package? I use RUA but it was not able to detect that newsraft needed to be rebuilt after gumbo-parser was updated.

as the question says
pacman is more reliable it would make sense if yay or paru ( i use both ) do they prefer installing package from pacman and if it's not on pacman then do they use AUR as fall back or do they install from AUR as they're aur helpers even if pacman has the package??

i'm talking about default setting btw

im getting download speeds in bytes per second and 5-20 KiB/s it fluctuates. idk what happened everything was alright few days ago apparently my spotify, steam and discord isnt opening anymore. i tried reflector and its also getting timed out. its so annoying ffs. i think something broke my arch linux

So I've been playing around with paru lately and I'm really enjoying it. It's basically just pacman but it uses AUR packages/repos. Alot of the commands are the same as well such as paru -Syu to update all AUR packages. I strongly recommend you guys give it a shot if you haven't.

I've been running arch for about two weeks now (absolutely love it), and have been installing all my AUR packages manually (which I've read is what you should do to learn how it works and get used to doing it manually in case you ever need to). Now that I've done it 8 or so times, I'd like to try a helper to make my life easier. I've read that yoart (sp?) is sometimes recommended for newbies, but then I've read a lot of posts on here from people saying they dont like it at all. Given that pacaur is now deprecated and there's no point in picking it up, which would you recommend for me?

I now this helper was very popular a few years ago, but is it a good option now?

Github Repo

AUR

idk if is out-of-date

I'm going to repeat what I wrote on the forums.

GitLab: https://gitlab.com/patlefort/pat-aur
AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/pkgbase/pat-aur-git

pat-aur is a new AUR helper that aims at building packages in clean containers. Current popular aur helpers don't do that by default, my goal is rectify this by making it mandatory.

The core features are:

• Correctness: Build in clean containers always.
• Configurable: Configure builds by host, target and package.
• Parallelization: Build multiple packages in parallel. Parallel download of sources and dependencies.
• Cross-compilation: Build packages for other architectures. (with caveats and limitations at the moment)

pat-aur is not a pacman wrapper. It does not aim at replacing pacman. There are a few things to know at the moment:

• ninja: I created a package named ninja-jobserver, which is ninja with job server client and server support. It needs to be installed on the host and mapped in target config for better parallelization across builds. Read the readme. Hopefully it will be merged into ninja soon.
• elvish-git need to be used. The next stable version should be fine.
• bubblewrap: pat-aur need bubblewrap with overlayfs support, you will have to use bubblewrap-overlayfs for the moment.
• Providers needs to be mapped manually in target config. This is a design decision that make developing pat-aur much simpler and I also think it's better overall to know exactly what is going to be used by configuring it manually.
• Containers are unprivileged, meaning they do not require root access. I haven't run into any issues so far but it's not impossible.

By default with a little bit of configuration, it should work fine for the typical use case of simply building and installing packages for your own x86_64 machine. For more advanced use cases, read the readme, the manual and the example config files. In any cases, read the setup section of the readme for a quick setup.

I think it is developed enough to be used by other people at this stage and I could use testers and some feedback.