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How I set up packages for AUR

Recently, I often found myself maintaining packages in AUR. That’s why I made my mind to write down a blog post about how the process goes.

Quick review

For those who don’t know, AUR (Arch User Repository) is a community-driven repository for Arch Linux users. It allows anyone to contribute PKGBUILDs — scripts that automate building and installing packages. Maintaining AUR packages is a way to share software that isn’t in the official repos and also helps you learn a lot about Linux packaging.

The process

As it is described here, the things we need to accomplish are basically:

  1. Download the source tarball of the software to package.
  2. Try compiling the package and installing it into an arbitrary directory.
  3. Copy over the prototype /usr/share/pacman/PKGBUILD.proto and rename it to PKGBUILD in a temporary working directory.
  4. Edit the PKGBUILD according to the needs of your package.
  5. Run makepkg and check whether the package builds correctly.
  6. If not, repeat the previous two steps.

Creating the PKGBUILD

Arch Linux is also famous for its rich and well-documented wiki. It’s hard to overstate how overstate until you’ve actually had to rely on it for complex packaging tasks.

Especially, articles such as PKGBUILD - ArchWiki, Creating packages - ArchWiki assists the creating of package a lot.

Testing the package

Before pushing PKGBUILD to the AUR, we have to ensure our package is working correctly, I mean built correctly. To do so, I often do

makepkg -si

This builds and installs the package with its dependencies.

Tools like namcap and pkgctl are also very handy.

  • namcap - basically checks for the syntax issues in the PKGBUILD file.
  • pkgctl is a bit interesting. Using pkgctl, we are able to test out package for build and dependency issues in sandboxed environment.

Publishing

Once the package is ready, uploading it to AUR is straightforward.

Since I have already added my SSH public key to my AUR account, pushing changes is very convenient and secure. I don’t need to enter my credentials every time — Git handles authentication through SSH.

git clone aur@aur.archlinux.org:<pkgname>.git
cd <pkgname>
makepkg --printsrcinfo > .SRCINFO
git add PKGBUILD .SRCINFO
git commit -m "feat: init"
git push

Summary

Maintaining AUR packages has been a great learning experience. Not only does it help me and other Arch users, but it also gives insight into Linux packaging, version control, and software distribution. If you are an Arch user interested in contributing, starting your own AUR package is a great way to dive in.