Packer – Arch User Repository (AUR+Pacman) Helper For Arch Linux

packer is a package wrapper which is used to install packages from AUR & Pacman repository. It similar to Yaourt and designed to be a simple and very fast replacement for the basic functionality of Yaourt. Also over come yaourt drawbacks. It reduce manually effort to compiling and installing the packages available on AUR. AUR stands for Arch User Repository, it’s big community-driven repository and contains 44,000+ packages.

Install & Enable packer Package Tool

We can easily install packer package tool by cloning the files from packer git source.

[Install Dependency]
$ sudo pacman -S base-devel fakeroot jshon expac git wget

[Download PKGBUILD]
$ wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/PKGBUILD?h=packer

[Rename the file to PKGBUILD]
$ mv PKGBUILD\?h\=packer PKGBUILD

[Run makepkg on the PKGBUILD]
$ makepkg

[Install packer]
$ sudo pacman -U packer-*.pkg.tar.xz

[Sync AUR Packages]
$ packer -Syu

[Install a package from AUR]
$ packer -S [package]

Now you can install AUR packages without any trouble via Packer.

4 Comments on “Packer – Arch User Repository (AUR+Pacman) Helper For Arch Linux”

  1. It might take a little longer but after having used a lot of these wrappers, I now choose to have an aur directory, clone / pull and then build manually. I found that after a while my system had started filling up with git (and many other AUR) versions of software that were difficult to keep track and started causing operational and maintenence issues.
    These wrappers do have a place but make it very easy to forget that AUR should be used with caution. Vanilla style forces you to ask yourself “do I really want 8 other possibly unstable packages just for this?” and has brought great peace of mind since. YMMV

  2. Does someone still maintain packer actively as I noticed that one of the packer forum thread posters had already forked apacman program from the code to implement features that on the pages of discussion people were requesting as improvements to packer and seemed to get no responses from the developer?

    I may have misinterpreted but I got that impression from reading the discussion regarding the tool.

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