Arch Linux – How to install packages from AUR

The Arch Linux User Community Repository (AUR) is a community driven repository of PKGBUILDS (no binaries) for Arch users.

How AUR works

1. Arch Linux users contribute their own packages.
2. The AUR community votes for or against them.
3. Once a package gets voted high enough , an AUR Trusted User takes it to the community repository, which is accessible via pacman and ABS.

Installing Packages from AUR

What you will need – Yaourt.

Yaourt – Yet AnOther User Repository Tool (Yaourt) is a community-contributed wrapper for pacman which adds seamless access to the AUR, allowing and automating package compilation and installation from your choice of the 11,000+ PKGBUILDs in the AUR, in addition to the many thousands of available Arch binary packages.

Steps to install Yaourt

1. Install the base-devel package using pacman. It contains the compiler and libraries needed to compile binaries from source.

   $ pacman -S base-devel

2. Download Yaourt.tar.gz package and unpack it in a directory. You can use wget to download the package as follows :

   $ wget http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/yaourt.tar.gz

   Use tar command to unpack it in a directory.

   $ tar xvzf yaourt.tar.gz

   Move to that directory.

   $ cd yaourt

3. Build the yaourt package.

   $ makepkg

   After this operation, you will find a yaourt.pkg.tar.gz package in your current directory.

4. Install the package using pacman command as follows :

   $ pacman -U yaourt.pkg.tar.gz

Using Yaourt to Install Packages from AUR

Open up a terminal and type yaourt followed by package name to install the package.  For example, to install Google Chromium in Arch Linux, you can use the following command :

$ yaourt chromium

Then Arch Linux will download the source code of Chromium from AUR, compile it, and install it on your machine. It is as simple as that.  One thing to remember while installing packages from AUR is that, all the content is unsupported and contributed by individuals so there is no guarantee of these packages being  secure.

Update : Now there is a successor  to Yaourt called Paktahn. Yaourt doesn’t seem to be maintained anymore and has quite some problems and hence this new project. Read details about paktahn in this blog post.

Also check out the  step by step video of How to install Arch Linux.

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