'(AUR Getting Started Guide)
Audience: intermediate
There are many options to access Arch’s User Repository (AUR). The AUR is one of the most compelling features of Arch Linux. I’ll walk you through the simplest path to getting started with the AUR, with minimal bootstrapping effort.
The most primitive yet useful tool I’ve found for first accessing the AUR is cower. On the right side of that page you’ll see a link to “Download snapshot”. It’s https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/cower.tar.gz
Grab/extract/install it with:
cd $TMPDIR wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/cower.tar.gz tar xzvf cower.tar.gz cd cower makepkg -si
You could continue to search the AUR website for packages to install, and
continue to run wget/tar/cur/makepkg on them. But AUR managers make life much
better than that. And now with cower (and soon more) you have full
command-line access to the AUR!
Let’s search for a more featureful AUR
manager. cower is cool. You can use it directly, and it’s the simple base
command underlying a few of the other managers. It’s also a good tool for
learning about the low-level details of the AUR (now right now). But we’ll
prefer those managers that conform to pacman’s option syntax.
cower -s aurget cower -s pacaur cower -s yaourt
These also all happen to support nice Zsh completions.
Let’s find and install something useful.
Here is the list of
packages, sorted by popularity. You’ll notice yaourt is at the top.
Interesting. Install archey
aurget -S --noconfirm --noedit archey