aurutils Overview

aurutils is a comprehensive suite of scripts designed to automate the usage of the Arch User Repository (AUR). It streamlines tasks such as package searching, update checks, dependency resolution, and building packages.

The core philosophy of aurutils is to manage AUR packages through local pacman repositories rather than as foreign packages installed with pacman -U. This approach provides a more robust and manageable way to handle community-maintained software, integrating it seamlessly with your system's package management.

Key Features

  • Local Repository Management: Build and maintain your own pacman repositories for AUR packages, allowing you to manage them with standard tools like pacman.
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution: Intelligently calculates and resolves dependency trees for AUR packages, including dependencies that are also in the AUR.
  • Automated Syncing and Building: The aur-sync command provides a high-level interface to check for updates, fetch sources, resolve dependencies, and build packages in the correct order.
  • Chroot Builds: Supports building packages in a clean systemd-nspawn container for enhanced security and reliability.
  • Modular, Scriptable Tools: The suite is composed of small, single-purpose scripts (aur-search, aur-fetch, aur-build, etc.) that can be combined and scripted to create custom workflows.
  • Extensive Documentation: Each command is thoroughly documented via its own man page.

Core Concept: Local Repositories

Instead of downloading a PKGBUILD, building it with makepkg, and installing the resulting .pkg.tar.zst file as a 'foreign' package, aurutils helps you create one or more local repositories. For example, you can create a repository named custom in /home/user/custom-repo.

When you build a package with aur-build, the resulting package file is added to your local repository, and the repository database is updated. You can then install the package using pacman -S my-aur-package, just like any official package. pacman will automatically handle updates from your local repository when you run pacman -Syu.

This method offers several advantages:

  • Consistency: All packages are managed by pacman.
  • Simplicity: Updates are handled through standard pacman commands.
  • Sharing: A local repository can be easily shared across multiple machines on a network.

To get started with this approach, see the Quick Start Guide.