Setting up pacaur with the Arch User Repository

While not actually part of the Arch Linux base, most people will use the arch user repository (AUR) on an arch system to install applications that are not in the main arch repo.

AUR Managers

Since it's not possible to install packages out of the AUR with pacman in the regular way, AUR managers have been developed to wrap the packaging systems in arch. These AUR managers let users install packages out of the AUR in a way that resembles using pacman. Some of the more popular AUR managers include yaourt, pacaur, and packer.

pacaur

My Aur manager of choice is pacaur due to several reasons.

• It works in a way almost identical to pacman.

• It lets you accept all the prompts at the beginning.

• It assumes you know what you're doing.

Installing

Setting up pacaur on new system is fairly easy. It only requires one package not in the base repository: cower.

Download cower using wget or curl and then install using makepkg.

mkdir -p ~/Downloads/cower && cd ~/Downloads/cower
curl -O https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/cower.tar.gz
tar -xvf cower.tar.gz && cd cower
gpg --recv-key 1EB2638FF56C0C53 && gpg --lsign 1EB2638FF56C0C53
makepkg -sic

Then do the same for pacaur

mkdir ~/Downloads/pacaur && cd ~/Downloads/pacaur
curl -O https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/pacaur.tar.gz
tar -xvf pacaur.tar.gz && cd pacaur && makepkg -sic