Installing programs from the AUR
Found a program that isn't in the repos? First, you should check out the Arch User Repositories (AUR). They are programs put into a PKGBUILD which eases the installation for you. Let's say I want to install yaourt, a frontend to pacman with AUR support. First, I navigate to
This is the main page for the AUR. Now, click on "Packages" at the top, next to a few other links. Now type in what you want in the input box labeled "Keywords". I will type in "yaourt".
Find yaourt in the search results.
Now click on the link "Tarball". Navigate to the directory you downloaded it to and extract it. Now open up a terminal. cd to it (for example, if my extracted folder is on the desktop:
cd ~/Desktop/yaourt
Now type in "makepkg -s". This will solve all dependencies for you using pacman.
If all is well it should work. When it is finished, as root type:
pacman -U <insert name of pkg.tar.gz file>
Your program should now be installed!
So to sum this up:
- Browse to http://aur.archlinux.org
- Search for your program's page
- Download the tar.gz file containing all required files
- Uncompress the tar.gz file, cd to the extracted directory and type in 'makepkg -s'. This will also install any missing dependencies with pacman
- When it is finished, type in 'pacman -U <insert name of program and version>.pkg.tar.gz
- Your program is installed!
Yaourt can highly simplify this by doing most of the above for you. You can do things like pacman, and it also has coloured output!
Installing things from the AUR is as easy as installing from the repos:
yaourt -S <insert package name here>
It works just like pacman with added features. For more information on using pacman, look here: