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

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score 36 · Accepted Answer

yay

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Top Pro

Intuitive CLI

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

AdventurousSopdet's Experience

yay > trizen > pacaur > yaourt See More

Top Pro

Written in Go

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

cosmo's Experience

Slick and easy to use! 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

Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen

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

See All

The Best 1 of 13 OptionsWhy?

My Recommendation for yay

My Recommendation for yay

Intuitive CLI

Written in Go

Available as a precompiled binary

Doesn't rebuild already-installed apps like Trizen

Easy to add features

12 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

Secure

AUR comments, search and upgrade support

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 Pakku

My Recommendation for Pakku

Auto removes build dependencies

Wraps pacman

Uses pacman interface

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 PacUI

My Recommendation for PacUI

My Recommendation for aurman

My Recommendation for aurman

Native pacman compliant

Tends to break easily

Secure

My Recommendation for apacman

My Recommendation for apacman

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 Pamac

My Recommendation for Pamac

My Recommendation for Cower

My Recommendation for Cower

No automatic build support.

Very powerful search

Does not support the modern RPC interface

Minimalistic & Simple

My Recommendation for aurutils

My Recommendation for aurutils

Excellent split package and dependency support

Support for custom repositories