by Bryanpwo

Warning: Installing packages from the AUR is not supported by Arch linux, so beware that installing from it can cause system failure.

Although the official Arch repo houses a lot of useful packages, some packages aren’t included in it because of various reasons like being closed source, custom made packages by Arch users or because the original package creator dropped support for it and it’s being maintained by Arch users.

Unlike the packages in the Arch repo, the AUR packages are being maintained by Arch users and the majority are doing this on the side as a hobby next to their regular lifes. Therefore package updates aren’t tested extensively and can cause trouble by a non-responding app or even can cause breakage to the system, so using it is your own responsibility. However, don’t hesitate to ask the community for help if an update has caused problems, we will help you anyway.

Having informed you on that, you can use yay to install packages from the AUR and Pacman easily.

Installing packages

To install packages with yay you can use this command.

yay -S package_name

After that you will see a numbered list of the package name in the installed repos of your system. Simply type in the number of the package version you want to install and yay is going to install it on your system.

You can also search packages by simply type in:

yay package_name

If you want some more information on a package you can type in:

yay -Si package_name

Yay can also update both Pacman and AUR packages at once by this command:

yay -Syu

Again think twice before installing packages from the AUR and ask yourself if you really need the package you want to install.