What are the best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions?

Question

16

Options
Considered

293

User
Recs.

Aug 27, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

The Best 1 of 14 OptionsWhy?

Best AUR helpers for Arch-based Linux distributions	Price	Last Updated
91 yay	-	May 25, 2023
-- trizen	-	Jun 28, 2023
-- pikaur	-	Aug 27, 2023
-- Aura	-	Mar 4, 2018
53 Yaourt	-	May 17, 2020

See Full List

13 Other Options Considered

trizen

Top Pro

Easy to use

It's very intuitive and has a pacman-like syntax. See More

cosmo's Experience

Great experience all around! See More

Top Pro

Being written in Perl, trizen has an extra level of security over bash as well as performance and power benefits inherent to Perl

It is written in Perl in a functional-recurisive way, featuring full AUR dependencies support. Being written in Perl (or any other language, except bash), it means that it can't execute/source (silently) the PKGBUILD to get information for a package, which guarantees an extra-level of security. Other benefits are the performance and power that comes with Perl. See More

CoherentProteus's Experience

its possible to edit pkgbuild before install See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

It's written in Perl instead of Go that makes it so lightweight. See More

Prem Kumar's Experience

I prefer Trizen over yay due to it's more secure & lightweight PKGBUILD. See More

Top Pro

AUR comments, search and upgrade support

It can display comments for AUR packages, search for AUR packages and check for AUR package updates. See More

Top Pro

Secure

The PKGBUILD is not executed before it is displayed to the user and optionally edited. See More

Top Pro

Availability

It's in the Manjaro packages. See More

See All

pikaur

Top Pro

AUR package names in shell completion (bash, fish, zsh)

Top Con

Splits pacman -Syu to -Sy and -Su

-Sy (to refresh package list first) and -Su (to install upgrades after user confirmed the package list or has been altered it via [M]anual package selection). See More

Top Pro

Upgrade -git, -svn and other dev packages

Top Pro

Using systemd dynamic users if building packages as root user

Top Pro

Show unread Arch news before sysupgrade

Top Pro

Interactively handle common build problems (like untrusted GPG key or checksum mismatch, wrong architecture)

Top Pro

Can install packages even when others fail

Sometimes when building multiple unrelated packages, the failure of one means that none get installed. With this helper, it will not only ask you what to do during a failure, but you can skip the package all together without having to restart. See More

Top Pro

Remove make dependencies on completion

Some AUR packages require at times dozens of dependencies solely for the build process. Usually, once the build process is done, they stick around without purpose. This helper automatically removes those dependencies once all the builds are complete. See More

Top Pro

Retrieve PKGBUILDs from AUR and ABS (-G/--getpkgbuild)

Top Pro

Build local PKGBUILDs with AUR deps (-P/--pkgbuild)

See All

Aura

Top Pro

Written in Haskell

Since the application is written in Haskell, it means that, unless the author went out of their way to subvert the type system, at least some classes of bugs must have been eliminated for the project to even compile, and so at least some basic level of stability is guaranteed. See More

Top Con

aura is difficult to use for system upgrade.

sudo aura -Syu searches for .sig files for each repository. .Sig files are not used with pacman See More

Top Pro

Similar syntax to pacman

pacman -Ss ghc aura -As ghc See More

Top Pro

Run as Root, Build as a User

makepkg gets very upset if you try to build a package as root. That said, a built package can't be handed off to pacman and installed if you don't run as root. Other AUR helpers ignore this problem, but Aura does not. Even when run with sudo, packages are built with normal user privilages, then handed to pacman and installed as root. See More

See All

Yaourt

Top Con

Insecure

More information here. See More

Top Pro

Equivalent to pacman

Yaourt commands and flags match pacman, so it is immediately obvious how to use it. See More

cosmo's Experience

Yaourt is old and unsafe. Even the Arch Wiki advises against the use of Yaourt in favor of alternatives like Yay and Trizen. See More

Top Con

Not maintained anymore

According to the Wiki page of Archlinux, Yaourt development is stalled. See More

Top Pro

Colored output

EnterprisingFand's Experience

no longer supported/maintained See More

Top Con

Does not perform clean builds

Environment variables may get carried over while building a package, preventing successful building. See More

Top Pro

Adds seamless access to the AUR

cubethethird's Experience

I'm honestly surprised people still use yaourt. According to the github page, the last update it received (4 moths ago) was for translations. Otherwise it hasn't seen updates in years. Not only that, but it lacks many features that should be considered standard among such tools. Heck I'd recommend pacaur over this, despite that one having had all development dropped over a year ago, since it is probably still more secure (I don't however recommend actually sticking wit it for that reason). My current helper of choice is pikaur, since it behaves much like pacaur (with added bonuses), but I can't recommend yaourt. See More

Top Con

Bad split packages support

Top Pro

Can be set up upgrade your system with no additional prompts

Top Con

By default requires user input separately for each build instead of once before building them all

Yaourt will ask you whether you want to alter the PKGBUILD before building a package. However it will do this once at a time, meaning that it will let the user modify the PKGBUILD, build the package, let the user modify the next PKGBUILD, build the next package etc. This leads to the user being forced to constantly watch the yaourt command whether it requires input to proceed. You may completely supress the option to view and alter the PKGBUILDs by passing --noconfirm to yaourt. See More

Top Pro

You can adapt PKGBUILD to your needs during the (pre-)installation process

Top Pro

Supports backups

See All

apacman

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Pamac

Top Pro

AUR support

EncouragingHuitztlampaehecatl's Experience

Easy to use with overview of files and dependencies See More

Top Pro

Supports installation of local packages

See All

Packer

Top Con

The packer project is not actively maintained

Number of Issues and Pull Requests on GitHub has been growing without any action for almost a year. (See apacman - a fork with improvements). See More

Top Pro

Can also be used to install pacman packages

It's handy to be able to use one command to install any package, whether or not it's in AUR. See More

StudiousAmasagnul's Experience

Greatest installer for arch. See More

Top Con

Doesn't support shell tab completion

This can be easily added: https://github.com/erran/packer-completion See More

Top Pro

Simple, pacman-like interface.

Packer options are almost identical to those used by pacman. See More

Top Pro

Extremely fast search

Top Pro

Additional user input requests can be suppressed.

Sometimes a user does not want to confirm everything she does, the --noconfirm and --noedit flags reduce the number of time the install/update is stopped for user input. See More

See All

aurutils

Top Pro

Support for custom repositories

By default, packages are built and stored in a custom local repository, allowing packages to be installed, upgraded, and removed through pacman -S the same way official repository packages are. See More

Eli Schwartz's Experience

One of the very rare AUR helpers that is clean and simple, without a lot of internal magic, and still manages to be very powerful and useful. See More

Top Pro

Excellent split package and dependency support

Packages are built using tsort dependency ordering to ensure proper build order. The built packages are available in a custom repo and the user can easily install whichever parts of a split package they want. See More

Top Pro

Support for clean chroot builds

aurutils has seamless support for building packages in the same chroot containers used for building official repository packages. See More

See All

PacUI

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Cower

Top Con

No automatic build support.

Top Pro

Very powerful search

Top Con

Does not support the modern RPC interface

cower was never updated to take advantage of the multiinfo support introduced in https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17583 and therefore puts a heavy burden on the AUR server in addition to sometimes suffering timeouts. Users of cower are heavily encouraged to migrate to its successor, auracle (created by the cower developer as the next generation of cower). See More

Top Pro

Minimalistic & Simple

Some other solutions are like using a chainsaw as a butterknife, yeah it goes through the butter, but then it also goes through your leg, and you really wish you would have just grabbed the stick of butter and smeared it on your bread with your hands. Cower is the butterknife. It's easier than maintaining everything by hand but also forces you to pay attention (which you need to do anyway) See More

See All

pacaur

aurt

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yay

Top Pro

Easy to add features

It's written in Go so it is fairly easy to add features or tweak this amazing tool. See More

Top Con

Written in Go

Running a Go program requires the Go runtime. Go is also a garbage collected language, so the program isn't as responsive as it could be. See More

AdventurousSopdet's Experience

yay > trizen > pacaur > yaourt See More

Top Pro

Intuitive CLI

Yay's commands and output make sense for anyone used to the pacman package manager. See More

cosmo's Experience

Slick and easy to use! See More

Top Pro

Written in Go

The compiled program is snappy while the source is easy to read. See More

EnergeticPabilsag's Experience

It's really nice for users moving from pacman and also use codes copied from various guides online by just replacing 'pacman' with 'yay'. See More

Top Pro

Available as a precompiled binary

Both yay and yay-bin are in the AUR, the latter of which doesn't require any dependencies or compilation, making installation and updates quick and painless. See More

Top Pro

Yogurt interactive mode

Write package name without keys [yay <packagename>] to enter interactive mode. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen

See All

The Best 1 of 14 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for yay

My Recommendation for yay

Easy to add features

Written in Go

Intuitive CLI

Written in Go

Available as a precompiled binary

Yogurt interactive mode

Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen

13 Other Options Considered

My Recommendation for trizen

My Recommendation for trizen

Easy to use

Being written in Perl, trizen has an extra level of security over bash as well as performance and power benefits inherent to Perl

Lightweight

AUR comments, search and upgrade support

Secure

Availability

My Recommendation for pikaur

My Recommendation for pikaur

AUR package names in shell completion (bash, fish, zsh)

Splits pacman -Syu to -Sy and -Su

Upgrade -git, -svn and other dev packages

Using systemd dynamic users if building packages as root user

Show unread Arch news before sysupgrade

Interactively handle common build problems (like untrusted GPG key or checksum mismatch, wrong architecture)

Can install packages even when others fail

Remove make dependencies on completion

Retrieve PKGBUILDs from AUR and ABS (-G/--getpkgbuild)

Build local PKGBUILDs with AUR deps (-P/--pkgbuild)

My Recommendation for Aura

My Recommendation for Aura

Written in Haskell

aura is difficult to use for system upgrade.

Similar syntax to pacman

Run as Root, Build as a User

My Recommendation for Yaourt

My Recommendation for Yaourt

Insecure

Equivalent to pacman

Not maintained anymore

Colored output

Does not perform clean builds

Adds seamless access to the AUR

Bad split packages support

Can be set up upgrade your system with no additional prompts

By default requires user input separately for each build instead of once before building them all

You can adapt PKGBUILD to your needs during the (pre-)installation process

Supports backups

My Recommendation for paru

My Recommendation for paru

Fast

Actively maintained

Based on the design of yay

My Recommendation for apacman

My Recommendation for apacman

My Recommendation for Pamac

My Recommendation for Pamac

AUR support

Supports installation of local packages

My Recommendation for aurman

My Recommendation for aurman

Native pacman compliant

Tends to break easily

Secure

My Recommendation for Pakku

My Recommendation for Pakku

Auto removes build dependencies

Wraps pacman

Uses pacman interface

My Recommendation for Packer

My Recommendation for Packer

The packer project is not actively maintained

Can also be used to install pacman packages

Doesn't support shell tab completion

Simple, pacman-like interface.

Extremely fast search

Additional user input requests can be suppressed.

My Recommendation for aurutils