September 1, 2015 linux draft aur arch

'(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