yay – _{an AUR Helper Written in Go}

by Bryanpwo

Warning: Installing packages built from the AUR is at your own risk. These build instructions are user-provided content and not supported by Arch Linux, so be aware that installing from it can cause system failures.

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 build instructions are being maintained by Arch users and the majority are doing this on the side as a hobby next to their regular lives. 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 of 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 are 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

_{This will call yay -Syu which is set as default on running yay.}

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

You can search and install or remove normal packages from the repositories using yay.

You can identify where it finds the search term as a package or AUR build-instructions-files in the output:

More information:

AUR official Website: https://aur.archlinux.org/

Sourcecode: https://github.com/Jguer/yay

About AUR helpers: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_helpers

About building packages: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg

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