pacman/Tips and tricks
Related articles
See pacman for the main article.
For general methods to improve the flexibility of the provided tips or pacman itself, see Core utilities and Bash.
Contents
- 1 Cosmetic and convenience
-
2 Maintenance
- 2.1 Listing packages
- 2.2 Listing files owned by a package with size
- 2.3 Identify files not owned by any package
- 2.4 Removing unused packages
- 2.5 Removing everything but base group
- 2.6 Getting the dependencies list of several packages
- 2.7 Listing changed backup files
- 2.8 Back-up the pacman database
- 2.9 Check changelogs easily
-
3 Installation and recovery
- 3.1 Installing packages from a CD/DVD or USB stick
- 3.2 Custom local repository
- 3.3 Network shared pacman cache
- 3.4 Recreate a package from the file system
- 3.5 Backing up and retrieving a list of installed packages
- 3.6 Listing all changed files from packages
- 3.7 Reinstalling all packages
- 3.8 Restore pacman's local database
- 3.9 Recovering a USB key from existing install
- 3.10 Extracting contents of a .pkg file
- 3.11 Viewing a single file inside a .pkg file
- 3.12 Find applications that use libraries from older packages
- 4 Performance
Cosmetic and convenience
Operations and Bash syntax
In addition to pacman's standard set of features, there are ways to extend its usability through rudimentary Bash commands/syntax.
To install a number of packages sharing similar patterns in their names -- not the entire group nor all matching packages; eg. plasma:
# pacman -S plasma-{desktop,mediacenter,nm}
Of course, that is not limited and can be expanded to however many levels needed:
# pacman -S plasma-{workspace{,-wallpapers},pa}
Sometimes, -s
's builtin ERE can cause a lot of unwanted results, so it has to be limited to match the package name only; not the description nor any other field:
# pacman -Ss '^vim-'
pacman has the -q
operand to hide the version column, so it is possible to query and reinstall packages with "compiz" as part of their name:
# pacman -S $(pacman -Qq | grep compiz)
Graphical front-ends
- Discover — A collection of package management tools for KDE, using PackageKit.
- GNOME packagekit — GTK based package management tool
- GNOME Software — Gnome Software App. (Curated selection for GNOME)
- pcurses — Package management in a curses frontend
- tkPacman — GUI front-end for pacman. Depends on Tcl/Tk and X11 but neither on GTK+, nor on QT. It only interacts with the package database via the CLI of 'pacman'. So, installing and removing packages with tkPacman or with pacman leads to exactly the same result.
Utilities
- Lostfiles — Script for detecting orphaned files.
- Pacmatic — Pacman wrapper to check Arch News before upgrading, avoid partial upgrades, and warn about configuration file changes.
- pkgfile — Tool that finds what package owns a file.
- pkgtools — Collection of scripts for Arch Linux packages.
- srcpac — Simple tool that automates rebuilding packages from source.
Maintenance
See also System maintenance.
Listing packages
You may want to get the list of installed packages with their version, which is useful when reporting bugs or discussing installed packages.
- List all explicitly installed packages:
pacman -Qe
. - List all foreign packages (typically manually downloaded and installed):
pacman -Qm
. - List all native packages (installed from the sync database(s)):
pacman -Qn
. - List packages by regex:
pacman -Qs regex
. - List packages by regex with custom output format:
expac -s "%-30n %v" regex
(needs expac).
With size
To get a list of installed packages sorted by size, which may be useful when freeing space on your hard drive:
- Install expac and run
expac -H M '%m\t%n' | sort -h
. - Run pacgraph with the
-c
option. - Run apacmanAUR with the
-L
option.
To list the download size of several packages (leave packages
blank to list all packages):
$ expac -S -H M '%k\t%n' packages
To list explicitly installed packages not in base nor base-devel with size and description:
$ expac -H M "%011m\t%-20n\t%10d" $( comm -23 <(pacman -Qqen|sort) <(pacman -Qqg base base-devel|sort) ) | sort -n
Latest installed packages
Install expac and run expac --timefmt='%Y-%m-%d %T' '%l\t%n' | sort | tail -20
or expac --timefmt=%s '%l\t%n' | sort -n | tail -20
All packages that nothing else depends on
If you want to generate a list of all installed packages that nothing else depends on, you can use the following script. This is very helpful if you are trying to free hard drive space and have installed a lot of packages that you may not remember. You can browse through the output to find packages which you no longer need.
ignoregrp="base base-devel" ignorepkg="" comm -23 <(pacman -Qqt | sort) <(echo $ignorepkg | tr ' ' '\n' | cat <(pacman -Sqg $ignoregrp) - | sort -u)
For list with descriptions for packages:
expac -HM "%-20n\t%10d" $( comm -23 <(pacman -Qqt|sort) <(pacman -Qqg base base-devel|sort) )
Installed packages that are not in a specified group or repository
The following command will list any installed packages that are not in either base or base-devel, and as such were likely installed manually by the user:
$ comm -23 <(pacman -Qeq | sort) <(pacman -Qgq base base-devel | sort)
List all installed packages that are not in specified repository (repo_name
in example):
$ comm -23 <(pacman -Qtq | sort) <(pacman -Slq repo_name | sort)
List all installed packages that are in the repo_name
repository:
$ comm -12 <(pacman -Qtq | sort) <(pacman -Slq repo_name | sort)
Listing files owned by a package with size
This one might come in handy if you have found that a specific package uses a huge amount of space and you want to find out which files make up the most of that.
$ pacman -Qlq package | grep -v '/$' | xargs du -h | sort -h
Identify files not owned by any package
If your system has stray files not owned by any package (a common case if you do not use the package manager to install software), you may want to find such files in order to clean them up. The general process for doing so is:
- Create a sorted list of the files you want to check ownership of:
$ find /etc /opt /usr | sort > all_files.txt
- Create a sorted list of the files tracked by pacman (and remove the trailing slashes from directories):
$ pacman -Qlq | sed 's|/$||' | sort > owned_files.txt
- Find lines in the first list that are not in the second:
$ comm -23 all_files.txt owned_files.txt
This process is tricky in practice because many important files are not part of any package (e.g. files generated at runtime, custom configs) and so will be included in the final output, making it difficult to pick out the files that can be safely deleted.
The lostfilesAUR script performs similar steps, but also includes an extensive blacklist to remove common false positives from the output.
Removing unused packages
Orphans
For recursively removing orphans and their configuration files:
# pacman -Rns $(pacman -Qtdq)
If no orphans were found, pacman errors with error: no targets specified
. This is expected as no arguments were passed to pacman -Rns
.
Explicitly installed
Because a lighter system is easier to maintain, occasionally looking through explicitly installed packages and manually selecting unused packages to be removed can be helpful.
To list explicitly installed packages available in the official repositories:
$ pacman -Qen
To list explicitly installed packages not available in official repositories:
$ pacman -Qem
Removing everything but base group
If it is ever necessary to remove all packages except the base group, try this one liner:
# pacman -R $(comm -23 <(pacman -Qq|sort) <((for i in $(pacman -Qqg base); do pactree -ul $i; done)|sort -u|cut -d ' ' -f 1))
The one-liner was originally devised in this discussion, and later improved in this article.
Notes:
-
comm
requires sorted input otherwise you get e.g.comm: file 1 is not in sorted order
. -
pactree
prints the package name followed by what it provides. For example:
$ pactree -lu logrotate
logrotate popt glibc linux-api-headers tzdata dcron cron bash readline ncurses gzip
The dcron cron
line seems to cause problems, that is why cut -d ' ' -f 1
is needed - to keep just the package name.
Getting the dependencies list of several packages
Dependencies are alphabetically sorted and doubles are removed.
Note that you can use pacman -Qi
to improve response time a little. But
you will not be able to query as many packages. Unfound packages are simply skipped
(hence the 2>/dev/null
).
$ pacman -Si $@ 2>/dev/null | awk -F ": " -v filter="^Depends" \ '$0 ~ filter {gsub(/[>=<][^ ]*/,"",$2) ; gsub(/ +/,"\n",$2) ; print $2}' | sort -u
Alternatively, you can use expac
: expac -l '\n' %E -S $@ | sort -u
.
Listing changed backup files
If you want to backup your system configuration files you could copy all files in /etc/
, but usually you are only interested in the files that you have changed. Modified backup files can be viewed with the following command:
# pacman -Qii | awk '/^MODIFIED/ {print $2}'
Running this command with root permissions will ensure that files readable only by root (such as /etc/sudoers
) are included in the output.
Back-up the pacman database
The following command can be used to back up the local pacman database:
$ tar -cjf pacman_database.tar.bz2 /var/lib/pacman/local
Store the backup pacman database file on one or more offline media, such as a USB stick, external hard drive, or CD-R. See also Pacman tips#Backing up Local database with systemd for an alternative method.
The database can be restored by moving the pacman_database.tar.bz2
file into the /
directory and executing the following command:
# tar -xjvf pacman_database.tar.bz2
Using systemd
systemd can take snapshots of the pacman local database, each time it is modified.
Use the following scripts, changing the value of $pakbak
for the backup location accordingly. The pakbak.service
can also automaticall be enabled on boot:
/usr/lib/systemd/scripts/pakbak_script
#!/bin/bash declare -r pakbak="/pakbak.tar.xz"; ## set backup location tar -cJf "$pakbak" "/var/lib/pacman/local"; ## compress & store pacman local database in $pakbak
/usr/lib/systemd/system/pakbak.service
[Unit] Description=Back up pacman database [Service] Type=oneshot ExecStart=/bin/bash /usr/lib/systemd/scripts/pakbak_script RemainAfterExit=no
/usr/lib/systemd/system/pakbak.path
[Unit] Description=Back up pacman database [Path] PathChanged=/var/lib/pacman/local Unit=pakbak.service [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Check changelogs easily
When maintainers update packages, commits are often commented in a useful fashion. Users can quickly check these from the command line by installing paclogAUR. This utility lists recent commit messages for packages from the official repositories or the AUR, by using paclog package
.
Installation and recovery
Alternative ways of getting and restoring packages.
Installing packages from a CD/DVD or USB stick
To download packages, or groups of packages:
# cd ~/Packages # pacman -Syw base base-devel grub-bios xorg gimp --cachedir . # repo-add ./custom.db.tar.gz ./*
Then you can burn the "Packages" folder to a CD/DVD or transfer it to a USB stick, external HDD, etc.
To install:
1. Mount the media:
# mkdir /mnt/repo # mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/repo #For a CD/DVD. # mount /dev/sdxY /mnt/repo #For a USB stick.
2. Edit pacman.conf
and add this repository before the other ones (e.g. extra, core, etc.). This is important. Do not just uncomment the one on the bottom. This way it ensures that the files from the CD/DVD/USB take precedence over those in the standard repositories:
/etc/pacman.conf
[custom] SigLevel = PackageRequired Server = file:///mnt/repo/Packages
3. Finally, synchronize the pacman database to be able to use the new repository:
# pacman -Syu
Custom local repository
Use the repo-add script included with Pacman to generate a database for a personal repository. Use repo-add --help
for more details on its usage. Simply store all of the built packages to be included in the repository in one directory, and execute the following command (where repo is the name of the custom repository):
$ repo-add /path/to/repo.db.tar.gz /path/to/*.pkg.tar.xz
To add a new package to the database, or to replace the old version of an existing package in the database, run:
$ repo-add /path/to/repo.db.tar.gz /path/to/packagetoadd-1.0-1-i686.pkg.tar.xz
repo-remove is used in the exact same manner as repo-add, except that the packages listed on the command line are removed from the repository database.
Once the local repository database has been created, add the repository to pacman.conf
for each system that is to use the repository. An example of a custom repository is in pacman.conf
. The repository's name is the database filename with the file extension omitted. In the case of the example above the repository's name would simply be repo. Reference the repository's location using a file://
url, or via FTP using ftp://localhost/path/to/directory.
If willing, add the custom repository to the list of unofficial user repositories, so that the community can benefit from it.
If you happen to run several Arch boxes on your LAN, you can share packages so that you can greatly decrease your download times. Keep in mind you should not share between different architectures (i.e. i686 and x86_64) or you'll run into problems.
Read-only cache
If you are looking for a quick and dirty solution, you can simply run a standalone webserver which other computers can use as a first mirror: darkhttpd /var/cache/pacman/pkg
. Just add this server at the top of your mirror list. Be aware that you might get a lot of 404 errors, due to cache misses, depending on what you do, but pacman will try the next (real) mirrors when that happens.
Read-write cache
In order to share packages between multiple computers, simply share /var/cache/pacman/
using any network-based mount protocol. This section shows how to use shfs or sshfs to share a package cache plus the related library-directories between multiple computers on the same local network. Keep in mind that a network shared cache can be slow depending on the file-system choice, among other factors.
First, install any network-supporting filesystem; for example sshfs, shfs, ftpfs, smbfs or nfs.
Then, to share the actual packages, mount /var/cache/pacman/pkg
from the server to /var/cache/pacman/pkg
on every client machine.
Dynamic reverse proxy cache using nginx
nginx can be used to proxy requests to official upstream mirrors and cache the results to local disk. All subsequent requests for that file will be served directly from the local cache, minimizing the amount of internet traffic needed to update a large number of servers with minimal effort.
In this example, we will run the cache server on http://cache.domain.local:8080/
and storing the packages in /srv/http/pacman-cache/
.
Create the directory for the cache and adjust the permissions so nginx can write files to it:
# mkdir /srv/http/pacman-cache # chown http:http /srv/http/pacman-cache
Next, configure nginx as our dynamic cache (read the comments for an explanation of the commands):
/etc/nginx/nginx.conf
http { ... # nginx may need to resolve domain names at run time resolver 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4; # Pacman Cache server { listen 8080; server_name cache.domain.local; root /srv/http/pacman-cache; autoindex on; # Requests for package db and signature files should redirect upstream without caching location ~ \.(db|sig)$ { proxy_pass http://mirrors$request_uri; } # Requests for actual packages should be served directly from cache if available. # If not available, retrieve and save the package from an upstream mirror. location ~ \.tar\.xz$ { try_files $uri @pkg_mirror; } # Retrieve package from upstream mirrors and cache for future requests location @pkg_mirror { proxy_store on; proxy_redirect off; proxy_store_access user:rw group:rw all:r; proxy_next_upstream error timeout http_404; proxy_pass http://mirrors$request_uri; } } # Upstream Arch Linux Mirrors # - Configure as many backend mirrors as you want in the blocks below # - Servers are used in a round-robin fashion by nginx # - Add "backup" if you want to only use the mirror upon failure of the other mirrors # - Separate "server" configurations are required for each upstream mirror so we can set the "Host" header appropriately upstream mirrors { server localhost:8001; server localhost:8002 backup; server localhost:8003 backup; } # Arch Mirror 1 Proxy Configuration server { listen 8001; server_name localhost; location / { proxy_pass http://mirror.rit.edu$request_uri; proxy_set_header Host mirror.rit.edu; } } # Arch Mirror 2 Proxy Configuration server { listen 8002; server_name localhost; location / { proxy_pass http://mirrors.acm.wpi.edu$request_uri; proxy_set_header Host mirrors.acm.wpi.edu; } } # Arch Mirror 3 Proxy Configuration server { listen 8003; server_name localhost; location / { proxy_pass http://lug.mtu.edu$request_uri; proxy_set_header Host lug.mtu.edu; } } }
Finally, update your other Arch Linux servers to use this new cache by adding the following line to the mirrorlist
file:
/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Server = http://cache.domain.local:8080/archlinux/$repo/os/$arch ...
Synchronize pacman package cache using BitTorrent Sync
BitTorrent Sync is a new way of synchronizing folder via network (it works in LAN and over the internet). It is peer-to-peer so you do not need to set up a server: follow the link for more information. How to share a pacman cache using BitTorrent Sync:
- First install the btsyncAUR package from the AUR on the machines you want to sync
- Follow the installation instructions of the AUR package or on the BitTorrent Sync wiki page
- set up BitTorrent Sync to work for the root account. This process requires read/write to the pacman package cache.
- make sure to set a good password on btsync's web UI
- start the systemd daemon for btsync.
- in the btsync Web GUI add a new synchronized folder on the first machine and generate a new Secret. Point the folder to
/var/cache/pacman/pkg
- Add the folder on all the other machines using the same Secret to share the cached packages between all systems. Or, to set the first system as a master and the others as slaves, use the Read Only Secret. Be sure to point it to
/var/cache/pacman/pkg
Now the machines should connect and start synchronizing their cache. Pacman works as expected even during synchronization. The process of syncing is entirely automatic.
Preventing unwanted cache purges
By default, pacman -Sc
removes package tarballs from the cache that correspond to packages that are not installed on the machine the command was issued on. Because pacman cannot predict what packages are installed on all machines that share the cache, it will end up deleting files that should not be.
To clean up the cache so that only outdated tarballs are deleted, add this entry in the [options]
section of /etc/pacman.conf
:
CleanMethod = KeepCurrent
Recreate a package from the file system
To recreate a package from the file system, use bacman (included with pacman). Files from the system are taken as they are, hence any modifications will be present in the assembled package. Distributing the recreated package is therefore discouraged; see ABS and Arch Rollback Machine for alternatives.
An alternative tool would be fakepkgAUR. It supports parallelization and can handle multiple input packages in one command, which bacman both does not support.
Backing up and retrieving a list of installed packages
It is good practice to keep periodic backups of all pacman-installed packages. In the event of a system crash which is unrecoverable by other means, pacman can then easily reinstall the very same packages onto a new installation.
- First, backup the current list of non-local packages:
$ pacman -Qqen > pkglist.txt
- Store the
pkglist.txt
on a USB key or other convenient medium or gist.github.com or Evernote, Dropbox, etc.
- Copy the
pkglist.txt
file to the new installation, and navigate to the directory containing it.
- Issue the following command to install from the backup list:
# pacman -S $(< pkglist.txt)
In the case you have a list which was not generated like mentioned above, there may be foreign packages in it (i.e. packages not belonging to any repos you have configured, or packages from the AUR).
In such a case, you may still want to install all available packages from that list:
# pacman -S --needed $(comm -12 <(pacman -Slq|sort) <(sort badpkdlist) )
Explanation:
-
pacman -Slq
lists all available softwares, but the list is sorted by repository first, hence thesort
command. - Sorted files are required in order to make the
comm
command work. - The
-12
parameter display lines common to both entries. - The
--needed
switch is used to skip already installed packages.
Finally, you may want to remove all the packages on your system that are not mentioned in the list.
# pacman -Rsu $(comm -23 <(pacman -Qq|sort) <(sort pkglist))
Listing all changed files from packages
If you are suspecting file corruption (e.g. by software / hardware failure), but don't know for sure whether / which files really got corrupted, you might want to compare with the hash sums in the packages. This can be done with the following script.
The script depends on the accuracy of pacman's database in /var/lib/pacman/local/
and the used programs such as bash, grep and so on. For recovery of the database see #Restore pacman's local database. The mtree
files can also be extracted as .MTREE
from the respective package files.
#!/bin/bash -e # Select the hash algorithm. Currently available (see mtree files and mtree(5)): # md5, sha256 algo="md5" for package in /var/lib/pacman/local/*; do [ "$package" = "/var/lib/pacman/local/ALPM_DB_VERSION" ] && continue # get files and hash sums zgrep " ${algo}digest=" "$package/mtree" | grep -Ev '^\./\.[A-Z]+' | \ sed 's/^\([^ ]*\).*'"${algo}"'digest=\([a-f0-9]*\).*/\1 \2/' | \ while read -r file hash do # expand "\nnn" (in mtree) / "\0nnn" (for echo) escapes of ASCII # characters (octal representation) for ascii in $(grep -Eo '\\[0-9]{1,3}' <<< "$file"); do file="$(sed "s/\\$ascii/$(echo -e "\0${ascii:1}")/" <<< "$file")" done # check file hash if [ "$("${algo}sum" /"$file" | awk '{ print $1; }')" != "$hash" ]; then echo "$(basename "$package")" /"$file" fi done done
Reinstalling all packages
To reinstall all native packages, use:
# pacman -Qenq | pacman -S -
Foreign (AUR) packages must be reinstalled separately; you can list them with pacman -Qemq
.
Pacman preserves the installation reason by default.
Restore pacman's local database
Signs that pacman needs a local database restoration:
-
pacman -Q
gives absolutely no output, andpacman -Syu
erroneously reports that the system is up to date. - When trying to install a package using
pacman -S package
, and it outputs a list of already satisfied dependencies. - When
testdb
(part of pacman) reports database inconsistency.
Most likely, pacman's database of installed software, /var/lib/pacman/local
, has been corrupted or deleted. While this is a serious problem, it can be restored by following the instructions below.
Firstly, make sure pacman's log file is present:
$ ls /var/log/pacman.log
If it does not exist, it is not possible to continue with this method. You may be able to use Xyne's package detection script to recreate the database. If not, then the likely solution is to re-install the entire system.
Generating the package recovery list
Run the script (optionally passing additional directories with packages as parameters):
$ paclog-pkglist /var/log/pacman.log | ./pacrecover >files.list 2>pkglist.orig
This way two files will be created: files.list
with package files, still present on machine and pkglist.orig
, packages from which should be downloaded. Later operation may result in mismatch between files of older versions of package, still present on machine, and files, found in new version. Such mismatches will have to be fixed manually.
Here is a way to automatically restrict second list to packages available in a repository:
$ { cat pkglist.orig; pacman -Slq; } | sort | uniq -d > pkglist
Check if some important base package are missing, and add them to the list:
$ comm -23 <(pacman -Sgq base) pkglist.orig >> pkglist
Proceed once the contents of both lists are satisfactory, since they will be used to restore pacman's installed package database; /var/lib/pacman/local/
.
Performing the recovery
Define bash alias for recovery purposes:
# recovery-pacman() { pacman "$@" \ --log /dev/null \ --noscriptlet \ --dbonly \ --force \ --nodeps \ --needed \ # }
--log /dev/null
allows to avoid needless pollution of pacman log, --needed
will save some time by skipping packages, already present in database, --nodeps
will allow installation of cached packages, even if packages being installed depend on newer versions. Rest of options will allow pacman to operate without reading/writing filesystem.
Populate the sync database:
# pacman -Sy
Start database generation by installing locally available package files from files.list
:
# recovery-pacman -U $(< files.list)
Install the rest from pkglist
:
# recovery-pacman -S $(< pkglist)
Update the local database so that packages that are not required by any other package are marked as explicitly installed and the other as dependences. You will need be extra careful in the future when removing packages, but with the original database lost is the best we can do.
# pacman -D --asdeps $(pacman -Qq) # pacman -D --asexplicit $(pacman -Qtq)
Optionally check all installed packages for corruption:
# pacman -Qk
Optionally #Identify files not owned by any package.
Update all packages:
# pacman -Su
Recovering a USB key from existing install
If you have Arch installed on a USB key and manage to mess it up (e.g. removing it while it is still being written to), then it is possible to re-install all the packages and hopefully get it back up and working again (assuming USB key is mounted in /newarch)
# pacman -S $(pacman -Qq --dbpath /newarch/var/lib/pacman) --root /newarch --dbpath /newarch/var/lib/pacman
Extracting contents of a .pkg file
The .pkg
files ending in .xz
are simply tar'ed archives that can be decompressed with:
$ tar xvf package.tar.xz
If you want to extract a couple of files out of a .pkg
file, this would be a way to do it.
Viewing a single file inside a .pkg file
For example, if you want to see the contents of /etc/systemd/logind.conf
supplied within the systemd package:
$ tar -xOf /var/cache/pacman/pkg/systemd-204-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz etc/systemd/logind.conf
Or you can use vim, then browse the archive:
$ vim /var/cache/pacman/pkg/systemd-204-3-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz
Find applications that use libraries from older packages
Even if you installed a package the existing long-running programs (like daemons and servers) still keep using code from old package libraries. And it is a bad idea to let these programs running if the old library contains a security bug.
Here is a way how to find all the programs that use old packages code:
# lsof +c 0 | grep -w DEL | awk '1 { print $1 ": " $NF }' | sort -u
It will print running program name and old library that was removed or replaced with newer content.
Performance
Database access speeds
Pacman stores all package information in a collection of small files, one for each package. Improving database access speeds reduces the time taken in database-related tasks, e.g. searching packages and resolving package dependencies. The safest and easiest method is to run as root:
# pacman-optimize
This will attempt to put all the small files together in one (physical) location on the hard disk so that the hard disk head does not have to move so much when accessing all the data. This method is safe, but is not foolproof: it depends on your filesystem, disk usage and empty space fragmentation. Another, more aggressive, option would be to first remove uninstalled packages from cache and to remove unused repositories before database optimization:
# pacman -Sc && pacman-optimize
Download speeds
When downloading packages pacman uses the mirrors in the order they are in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
. The mirror which is at the top of the list by default however may not be the fastest for you. To select a faster mirror, see Mirrors.
Pacman's speed in downloading packages can also be improved by using a different application to download packages, instead of Pacman's built-in file downloader.
In all cases, make sure you have the latest Pacman before doing any modifications.
# pacman -Syu
Powerpill
Powerpill is a full wrapper for Pacman that uses parallel and segmented downloads to speed up the download process. Normally Pacman will download one package at a time, waiting for it to complete before beginning the next download. Powerpill takes a different approach: it tries to download as many packages as possible at once.
The Powerpill wiki page provides basic configuration and usage examples along with package and upstream links.
wget
This is also very handy if you need more powerful proxy settings than pacman's built-in capabilities.
To use wget
, first install the wget package then modify /etc/pacman.conf
by uncommenting the following line in the [options]
section:
XferCommand = /usr/bin/wget -c -q --show-progress --passive-ftp -O %o %u
Instead of uncommenting the wget
parameters in /etc/pacman.conf
, you can also modify the wget
configuration file directly (the system-wide file is /etc/wgetrc
, per user files are $HOME/.wgetrc
.
aria2
aria2 is a lightweight download utility with support for resumable and segmented HTTP/HTTPS and FTP downloads. aria2 allows for multiple and simultaneous HTTP/HTTPS and FTP connections to an Arch mirror, which should result in an increase in download speeds for both file and package retrieval.
Install aria2, then edit /etc/pacman.conf
by adding the following line to the [options]
section:
XferCommand = /usr/bin/aria2c --allow-overwrite=true --continue=true --file-allocation=none --log-level=error --max-tries=2 --max-connection-per-server=2 --max-file-not-found=5 --min-split-size=5M --no-conf --remote-time=true --summary-interval=60 --timeout=5 --dir=/ --out %o %u
See OPTIONS in man aria2c
for used aria2c options.
-d, --dir
- The directory to store the downloaded file(s) as specified by pacman.
-o, --out
- The output file name(s) of the downloaded file(s).
%o
- Variable which represents the local filename(s) as specified by pacman.
%u
- Variable which represents the download URL as specified by pacman.
Other applications
There are other downloading applications that you can use with Pacman. Here they are, and their associated XferCommand settings:
-
snarf
:XferCommand = /usr/bin/snarf -N %u
-
lftp
:XferCommand = /usr/bin/lftp -c pget %u
-
axel
:XferCommand = /usr/bin/axel -n 2 -v -a -o %o %u