Install packages from AUR with yay

Install packages from AUR with yay

What is the AUR?

The AUR is the Arch User Repository, it essentially holds a bunch of packages

from the Arch community not found in the official repository.

What is yay?

yay stands for Yet Another Yogurt

yay is like pacman but for the AUR

It's written in Go

Install yay

  • Make sure you have git:

    sudo pacman -S git
  • Install using git:

    git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
    cd yay
    makepkg -si
  • Install binary (Optional)

    git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git
    cd yay-bin
    makepkg -si

Commands

Some basics to get you started:

  • Install a package:

    yay -S <package>
  • Remove a package:

    yay -R <package>
    
    yay -Rns <package>   # <- remove package and dependencies
  • System upgrade:

    yay -Syu             # <- includes all packages even if installed with pacman
    
    yay                  # <- this does the same thing
    
    yay -Syu --devel     # <- includes -git installed packges
  • Search for a package

    yay -Ss <package>    # <- this will just search
    
    yay <package>        # <- this will search and ask if you want to install
    
    yay -Si <package>    # <- this will get info about the package, including dependencies
  • List out packages that need to be updated:

    yay -Pu
  • Clean up unused dependencies

    yay -Yc

Remember man yay should be your goto

Note on different types of packages

reddit link with explanation

Enable color output

Make sure you have the Color option set in your /etc/pacman.conf

AUR can be dangerous

Technically not all of the content up there is vetted.

So make sure what you download has lots of votes or that you have inspected the source code

yay -Slq | fzf -m --preview 'cat <(yay -Si {1}) <(yay -Fl {1} | awk "{print \$2}")' | xargs -ro  yay -S

yay

AUR

ArchWiki


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