Yaourt – Arch User Repository (AUR) Helper For Arch Linux

The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a community-driven repository for Arch users which contains approximately 44,000+ packages. It’s similar to third party repositories & PPA how rpm & deb based system have. Users can add and install their favorite packages from AUR but the problem is they can’t install AUR packages through standard package manager pacman. We have to manually download, check & install AUR packages. This is where Yaourt & packer came to picture.

Yaourt stands for Yet Another User Repository Tool is a package wrapper which is used to install packages from AUR & pacman repository, how pacman works. Yaourt also use the same syntax like pacman.

It contains package descriptions PKGBUILDs that allow you to compile a package from source with makepkg and then install it via Yaourt. A good number of new packages that enter the official repositories start in the AUR.

Yaourt Feature

  • AUR support (search, install, check conflict and dependency)
  • Interactive search and install
  • Building packages directly from ABS source
  • Handling backup files: .pac*
  • Save, restore alpm database. Query directly from a backup file.
  • Search orphans and test local database
  • Support splitted packages

1) Install & Enable Yaourt Package Tool

Install & Enable Yaourt Package Tool through custom repository which is very handy to do. Just open /etc/pacman.conf file and add the below repository at the bottom.

[Add Yaourt Repo]
$ sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf
[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch

[Install Yaourt]
$ sudo pacman -Syu yaourt

[Sync AUR Packages]
$ yaourt -Syu

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

2) Install Yaourt from AUR

Alternatively we can Install & Enable Yaourt Package Tool from AUR.

[Install required dependencies]
$ sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git wget

[Query alpm database and AUR]
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/package-query.git

[Navigate to package-query directory]
$ cd package-query

[Compile the package]
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ..

[Download the latest Yaourt package]
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yaourt.git
$ cd yaourt

[Compile the package]
$ makepkg -si
$ cd ..

[Remove the folder]
$ sudo rm -Rf yaourt package-query

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

About Magesh Maruthamuthu

Love to play with all Linux distribution

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