Pacaur
Pacaur is an Arch User Repository (AUR) helper aiming at speed and simplicity, designed to minimize user prompt interaction and to use an uncluttered interface. It is written in Bash and built upon the well designed cower and expac C backends.
Contents
Philosophy
Pacaur's main feature revolves around a fast workflow idea, that is, spending as little time as possible interacting with package management prompts. Speed, simplicity and the need for an uncluttered interface were also taken into consideration.
A few characteristics:
- It minimizes user interaction, by retrieving and editing all PKGBUILDs, solving conflicts and asking about providers before building anything.
- It fully supports split packages with proper independent subpackages installation.
- It can be used as a separate AUR frontend, or a single tool to manage official and AUR packages.
- It does not add a lot of features, but simply extends pacman to manage the AUR.
- It solves the dependency tree entirely through the AUR RPC interface in a secure and
- It is a small bash script using existing tiny libraries and has very good performance with a small memory footprint.
See also Why pacaur sucks less in the official forum thread.
Installation
Install cowerAUR and its dependencies, and then pacaurAUR itself. Both packages are available in the AUR.
Usage
Invoking pacaur consists of supplying an operation, any applicable options, and usually one or more targets.
usage: pacaur <operation> [options] [target(s)] operations: pacman extension -S, -Q extend pacman operations to the AUR AUR only -s, --search search AUR repository for matching strings -i, --info view package information -d, --download download target(s) -- pass twice to download AUR dependencies -m, --makepkg download and make target(s) -y, --sync download, make and install target(s) -k, --check check for AUR update(s) -u, --update update AUR package(s) general -v, --version display version information -h, --help display help information options: pacman extension - can be used with the -S, -Ss, -Si, -Sii, -Sw, -Su, -Qu, -Sc, -Scc operations -a, --aur only search, install or clean target(s) from the AUR -r, --repo only search, install or clean target(s) from the repositories general -e, --edit edit target(s) PKGBUILD and view install script -c, --clean clean target(s) build files -- can be combined with the -m, -y, -u operations -q, --quiet show less information for query and search --devel consider AUR development packages upgrade --ignore ignore a package upgrade (can be used more than once) --needed do not reinstall already up to date target(s) --noconfirm do not prompt for any confirmation --noedit do not prompt to edit files --rebuild always rebuild package(s)
Userbase target
Pacaur has two types of users in mind:
- those who prefer to have one single tool to manage AUR and official repositories,
- those who prefer to keep their AUR frontend separate from Pacman.
As such there are two sets of commands:
- commands that wrap the pacman binary (-S, -Ss, -Si, -Sw. -Su, -Qu, -Sc) and extend its functions to the AUR. This behavior can be disabled with the fallback variable in the config file.
- commands that are AUR specific (-s, -i, -m, -y, -k, -u).
Example
By default, pacaur -Ss package will search the repo, then the AUR if necessary.
$ pacaur -Ss expac community/expac 1-2 pacman database extraction utility aur/expac-git 20110324-1 (24) pacman database extraction utility
This behavior is optional and can be disabled with the fallback variable in the config file. When disabled, pacaur -Ss package will search the repo only.
Also, pacaur -Ssr package will be restricted to searching in the repo only, while pacaur -Ssa package will search the AUR.
$ pacaur -Ssr expac community/expac 1-2 pacman database extraction utility
$ pacaur -Ssa expac aur/expac-git 20110324-1 (24) pacman database extraction utility
pacaur -s package will search the AUR only.
$ pacaur -s expac aur/expac-git 20110324-1 (24) pacman database extraction utility
Configuration
Here are the available options in the config file:
#!/bin/bash # # /etc/xdg/pacaur/config # # The following options are commented out with their default values listed. # If you wish to use different values, uncomment and update the values. # The Color and VerbosePkgLists options can be enabled in /etc/pacman.conf. #builddir="${BUILDDIR:-$tmpdir}" # build directory #editor="${EDITOR:-vi}" # PKGBUILD editor #editpkgbuild=true # edit PKGBUILD script #editinstall=true # edit install script #fallback=true # pacman fallback to the AUR #clean=true # clean up after package install #cleandevel=true # clean up devel package #sortbyvotes=true # sort search results by votes #sudoloop=false # prevent sudo timeout
See also man pacaur.
Config files
Pacaur fully honors pacman and makepkg configuration files, as well as the sudoers and cower config file (if existing).
In particular, the following options in /etc/pacman.conf
can be used for further configuration:
- Colors to enable colored output.
- VerbosePkgLists to display the name, version and size of target packages formatted as a table.
Note that pacman and makepkg environment variables ($BUILDDIR
, $PKGDEST
, $PACMAN
, ...) are fully honored.
Sudo configuration
Pacaur is designed to be used with sudo for minimal password prompting and your /etc/sudoers
should be configured accordingly.
To avoid password prompt timeout (typically if you went grabbing a coffee while waiting the build to finish), disable it in your sudoers:
Defaults passwd_timeout=0
Alternatively, enable the sudoloop option in the config file.
Auto completion
Bash
Because of speed issue, AUR completion is disabled by default.
You can enable it by uncommenting this line in the /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/pacaur
file:
# S) _pacman_pkg Slq; _cower_pkg;; # disabled. Too slow and no fallback var support.
Zsh
You can disable AUR completion using the following zstyle:
zstyle ':completion:*:pacaur:*' remote-access false
The name `remote-access` mimics other completion zstyles like _cvs and _scp that use this for deciding whether to complete remote files or not.
Troubleshooting
No results found for error
If pacman or its dependencies are updated, pacaur may output "no results found for error". If this occurs, you may need to rebuild the cowerAUR backend.
Host name error
When checking AUR packages for updates, pacaur outputs a lot of "Couldn't resolve host name" and "Timeout was reached" messages in spite of the internet line working correctly.
- Configure your DNS server to improve queries speed. Try using Google primary DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
- Alternatively, tweak cower's config file to decrease the number of threads used in "MaxThread" variable.
Using gvim as editor
When using gvim as editor, gvim opens but the build continues. In the config file, try:
editor="gvim --nofork"
Improving pacaur
Internationalization
See Internationalization howto.
Bug reports
When reporting problems, please:
- check whether "makepkg -si" can build and install a package successfully. As pacaur relies exclusively on makepkg to build and install packages, the PKGBUILD must be corrected by its maintainer if makepkg fails.
- check whether the package and its dependencies provide correct AUR metadata.
- check that the problem is reproducible, and is not caused by a misconfiguration of pacaur/pacman/makepkg/sudoers/gpg/etc.
- post the ouput of "bash -x pacaur <your command>" in the forum thread or on github to help debug the issue.
Feature requests
Pacaur is considered as being "feature complete" and will most probably not include any new features. However, any improvement request or patch will be considered, and might be implemented as long as the objectives of speed, simplicity, fast workflow, uncluttered interface and the Arch way are respected.