Configuration

aurutils can be configured through a central environment file and various environment variables that control the behavior of its different commands.

Environment File

aurutils can load configuration variables from a central environment file. By default, it looks for this file at:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/aurutils/env

If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set, it defaults to ~/.config/aurutils/env.

The file uses a simple KEY=VALUE format. For example:

# ~/.config/aurutils/env

AURDEST=/home/user/aur-packages
AUR_REPO=custom
AUR_PAGER=vifm
AUR_CONFIRM_PAGER=1

Setting a Custom Environment File

You can specify a different environment file at runtime by setting the AUR_ENV variable:

AUR_ENV=/path/to/my/env aur sync ...

Common Environment Variables

Here is a list of commonly used environment variables across the aurutils suite. For command-specific variables, refer to the respective command's documentation page.

  • AUR_REPO: The default local repository to use for operations like aur-build and aur-sync. If unspecified, aurutils will try to auto-detect it from your pacman.conf but may require explicit selection if you have multiple local repos.

  • AURDEST: The directory where aur-sync clones or downloads package source files. Defaults to $XDG_CACHE_HOME/aurutils/sync. For persisting local modifications to PKGBUILDs, it's recommended to set this to a permanent location like /home/user/aur-sources.

  • AUR_PAGER: The file manager or pager used by aur-view to inspect build files. If not set, it defaults to vifm. Example: AUR_PAGER="less -K"

  • AUR_CONFIRM_PAGER: If set to a non-zero value, aur-view will display a confirmation prompt after the pager exits successfully. This is useful for file managers that don't support exiting with a non-zero status code to indicate rejection.

  • AUR_DEBUG: If set, enables verbose debug output (set -o xtrace) for most aurutils scripts.

  • NO_COLOR: If set, disables colorized output in scripts that support it.

  • AUR_EXEC_PATH: A custom path to search for aur-* command scripts, prepended to the system $PATH. Defaults to /usr/lib/aurutils.

  • AUR_PACMAN_AUTH: A command prefix for running pacman as root, e.g., for installing dependencies. Defaults to sudo.

  • AUR_DBROOT: Specifies the root directory of a local repository, overriding the path derived from pacman.conf's Server directive. Used by aur-build and aur-repo.

  • AUR_DBEXT: The file extension for the repository database. Defaults to .db.