AUR helpers

Warning:

• AUR helpers are not supported by Arch Linux. It is recommended to become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems on one's own.
• AUR helpers can replicate pacman(8) usage for the official repositories, such as pacman -Syu. This usage may deviate from pacman in various ways; it is thus not supported or recommended.

AUR helpers are written to automate certain tasks for the Arch User Repository.

Uploading

• aur4_import.sh — Splits a package from a git repository with multiple packages, adding/updating .SRCINFO for every commit.
• aur4_make_submodule.sh — Replaces a package in a bigger git repository with an AUR 4 submodule, including .SRCINFO.
• aurpublish — Manage AUR packages as git subtrees. The generation of .SRCINFO files, PKGBUILD checking and the creation of a per package commit message template is left to the git hooks in the same repo.

Maintenance

• aur-out-of-date — Uses hoster APIs to check AUR packages for upstream changes

https://github.com/simon04/aur-out-of-date || aur-out-of-date^AUR

• pkgbuild-watch — Looks for changes on the upstream web pages

http://kmkeen.com/pkgbuild-watch || pkgbuild-watch^AUR

• pkgbuildup — Helps AUR package maintainers automatically update PKGBUILD files. Supports a template variable syntax.

https://github.com/fasheng/pkgbuildup || pkgbuildup-git^AUR

• pkgcheck — Uses rules in PKGBUILDs to parse upstream version information or looks for changes by checksumming the web page

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162816 || Repository: GitHub

• pkgoutofdate — Parses the source URL from PKGBUILDs and tries to find new versions of packages by incrementing the version number and sending requests to the web server

https://github.com/anatol/pkgoutofdate || pkgoutofdate-git^AUR

Libraries

• haskell-archlinux — Library to access the AUR and package metadata from the Haskell programming language

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/archlinux || haskell-archlinux^AUR

• python3-aur — Python 3 modules for accessing AUR package information and automating AUR interactions.

http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/python3-aur || python3-aur^AUR

Build and search

The columns have the following meaning:

• Secure: does not source the PKGBUILD at all by default; or, alerts the user and offers the opportunity to inspect the PKGBUILD manually before it is sourced. Some helpers are known to source PKGBUILDs before the user can inspect them, allowing malicious code to be executed. Optional means that there is a command line flag or configuration option to prevent the automatic sourcing before viewing.
• Clean build: does not export new variables that can prevent a successful build process.
• Reliable parser: ability to handle complex packages by using the provided metadata (RPC/.SRCINFO) instead of PKGBUILD parsing, such as aws-cli-git^AUR.
• Reliable solver: ability to correctly solve and build complex dependency chains, such as ros-lunar-desktop^AUR.
• Split packages: A project is considered to support split packages if it has the ability to correctly build and install:

– Multiple packages from the same package base, without rebuilding or reinstalling multiple times, such as clion^AUR

– Split packages which depend on a package from the same package base, such as libc++^AUR and libc++abi^AUR.

– Split packages independently, such as python-pyalsaaudio^AUR and python2-pyalsaaudio^AUR.

• Git clone: uses git-clone(1) instead of downloading tarballs which is deprecated.
• Maintained: A project is considered maintained if it fullfills all of the following criteria:

– it is not discontinued by the author in favor of a different project or otherwise;

– it has seen general activity in the last 6 months;

– existing issues on security and clean build (as described above) have been worked on in the last 6 months.

• Syntax: P stands for Pacman-like, S for specific.

Name	Written In	Maintained	Secure	Clean build	Reliable parser	Reliable solver	Split packages	Git clone	Shell completion	Syntax	Specificity
aura	Haskell	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No [1]	No	bash, zsh	P	Downgrade, ABS, powerpill support, multilingual, requires ArchHaskell
auracle-gitAUR	C++	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	Yes	N/A	No	N/A	S	No automatic builds
aurel	Emacs Lisp	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A	N/A	No	N/A	S	Emacs integration, no automatic builds
aurgetAUR	Bash	No	Optional	Yes	No	No	No [2]	No	bash, zsh	P	sort by votes
aurmanAUR	Python	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	bash	P	batch interaction, fetch pgp keys, sort by popularity, deep search
aurutils	Bash/C	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	zsh	S	vifm, PCRE, local repository, package signing, systemd-nspawn support, sort by votes/popularity
bauerbill	Python	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	bash, zsh	P/S	Trust management, ABS support, extends Powerpill
burgaurAUR	Python/C	No [3]	Optional, with mc	Yes	No	No	No	No	None	P	Wrapper for cower
cower	C	No [4]	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A	N/A	No	bash/zsh	S	No automatic builds, regex support, sort by votes/popularity
naamanAUR	Python	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	bash	P/S	-
pacaur	Bash/C	No [5]	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	bash, zsh	P/S	multilingual, sort by votes/popularity, batch interaction
packer	Bash	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	No	None	P	-
pakkuAUR	Nim	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	bash	P	Pacman-like user interface
pbgetAUR	Python	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A	N/A	Yes	None	S	No automatic builds
pikaurAUR	Python	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	bash, fish, zsh	P/S	dynamic users, multilingual, sort by votes/popularity, batch interaction
PKGBUILDerAUR	Python	Yes	Optional	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial [6]	Yes	None	P	Automatic builds by default, use -F to disable; multilingual
prm	Bash	No	Yes [7]	N/A	Yes	N/A	N/A	Yes	None	S	No automatic builds, ABS support
repoctlAUR	Go	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes [8]	N/A	N/A	No	zsh	S	No automatic builds, local repository support
spinachAUR	Bash	No	Yes [9]	Yes	No	No	No	No	None	S	-
trizenAUR	Perl	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes [10]	Yes	Yes [11]	Yes [12]	bash, zsh	P	AUR comments
wrapaurAUR	Bash	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	None	S	Mirror updates, print news and AUR comments
yaahAUR	Bash	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	N/A	N/A	Optional	bash	S	No automatic builds
yaourtAUR	Bash/C	No	No (yaourt -Si) [13] [14]	No [15]	No	No [16]	No [17]	Optional	bash, zsh, fish	P	Backup, ABS support, AUR comments, multilingual
yayAUR	Go	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	bash, zsh, fish	P	sort by votes, batch interaction

Note:

• Pacman 4.2. introduced architecture specific fields. [18] AurJson merges these fields to their generic counterparts, such as depends and makedepends: FS#48796. Helpers relying on the RPC may use the below workarounds to retrieve dependencies:

– Retrieve specific fields from .SRCINFO: bauerbill^AUR [19], pkgbuilder^AUR [20]

– Strip the lib32- prefix on i686 systems: aurutils^AUR [21], pacaur^AUR [22], trizen^AUR [23]

• The RPC does not support querying versioned packages: FS#54906. pacaur^AUR and aurman-git^AUR implement this manually.