Hosting Pacman Repositories with Git

aurutils primarily deals with local file:// repositories, but it's possible to host your pacman repository using Git. This provides several advantages, such as atomic changesets and easy rollbacks.

Advantages

  • Atomic Changesets: Each commit can be viewed as a single, consistent set of packages. This allows mirrors to synchronize reliably. Mirrors can perform a shallow clone to reduce bandwidth while maintaining atomicity.
  • Changeset-Based Rollbacks: Rolling back to a previous state is as simple as checking out a specific commit hash. This can be specified directly in the Server directive in pacman.conf.

Disadvantages

  • Requires Raw File Access: The server hosting the Git repository must provide a way to access raw files directly through a predictable URL structure so that pacman can download them.

Hosting Templates

Here are some example Server URL formats for popular Git hosting platforms. The ${commit:-master} part allows you to pin the repository to a specific commit or default to the master/main branch.

# cgit
Server = https://cgit/$repo.git/plain/

# GitLab
Server = https://gitlab.com/$user/$repo/raw/${commit:-master}/

# Gogs
Server = https://try.gogs.io/$user/$repo/raw/${commit:-master}/

# GitHub
Server = https://raw.githubusercontent.com/$user/$repo/${commit:-master}/

Example: Using GitHub

  1. Create a public GitHub repository (e.g., my-aur-packages).

  2. Clone the repository locally and add your built packages and database files. 

    git clone https://github.com/your-user/my-aur-packages.git
cd my-aur-packages
# ...build packages into this directory...
repo-add my-aur-packages.db.tar.gz *.pkg.tar.zst

  3. Commit and push the changes. 

    git add .
git commit -m "Update packages"
git push origin master

  4. Configure pacman.conf on a client machine to use this repository. 

    [my-aur-packages]
SigLevel = PackageOptional
Server = https://raw.githubusercontent.com/your-user/my-aur-packages/master

  5. Synchronize pacman. 

    sudo pacman -Syu

Your packages are now available to be installed via pacman -S from your Git-hosted repository.