Yaourt
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Yaourt (Yet AnOther User Repository Tool) is a wrapper for pacman which adds automated access to the AUR using the same syntax as pacman.
Contents
Installation
First install package-queryAUR as a dependency, and then the yaourtAUR package itself. Since both those packages are available from the AUR, you will have to install them with the official method for installing unsupported packages, which is exhaustively described in the AUR article. It is important that you understand what "unsupported package" really means, and you can take this as an opportunity to learn what are the operations that AUR helpers like yaourt make automatic.
Alternatively, add the (unsigned) archlinuxfr repository as described on the yaourt homepage.
Configuration
See the yaourt(8) and yaourtrc(5) pages for general information.
Persistent local source repositories
By default, yaourt will pull remote repositories for building to /tmp. To avoid having to refetch whole repositories whenever AUR packages update, you can change this directory by uncommenting and setting DEVELSRCDIR in yaourtrc to wherever you want source repositories pulled to. Note this will only apply to devel packages, usually suffixed by -git or -svn.
/etc/yaourtrc
DEVELSRCDIR="/var/abs/local/yaourtbuild"
Cache
Yaourt by default does not save built package tarballs during installation. To save built AUR packages in the default pacman folder /var/cache/pacman/pkg, edit /etc/yaourtrc and set:
# Build EXPORT=2
Alternatively, set up a separate folder for Yaourt packages by changing these lines to:
# Build EXPORT=1 EXPORTDIR="/var/cache/pacman/pkg-local"
Build directory
Yaourt uses /tmp (mounted as tmpfs, limited to 50% of RAM) to compile packages, which may be problematic for systems with low RAM or limited swap space. Change the location in /etc/yaourtrc by uncommenting and changing the TMPDIR variable.