Arch User Repository
Use the AUR at your own risk! No support will be provided by the Manjaro team for any issues that may arise relating to software installations from the AUR. When Manjaro is updated, AUR packages might stop working. This is not a Manjaro issue
Although Manjaro is very close to Arch Linux and mostly compatible —being based on Arch Linux itself— it is not possible to access their official repositories for use in Manjaro. Instead, Manjaro uses its own repositories in order to ensure that any software packages that are accessible, such as system updates and applications, have been fully tested to be compatible and stable before release. It is still possible to access additional software packages from the Arch User Repository (AUR).
The AUR is managed by the Arch Linux user community itself. Although this repository is unofficial, software packages first placed here can eventually make their way into Arch Linux’s official (community) repository if they become popular enough.
AUR, as a community maintained repository, present potential risks and problems.
Possible risks using AUR packages:
- Multiple versions of the same packages.
- Out of date packages.
- Broken or only partially working packages.
- Improperly configured packages which download unnecessary dependencies, or do not download necessary dependencies, or both.
- Malicious packages (although extremely rare).
As such, although much of the software packages provided by the AUR should work, do not expect the installation process to always be quite as straight-forward as when you are using the official Manjaro repositories.
On occasion, it may be necessary to manually identify and install dependencies yourself (such as, after an aborted installation attempt).
Again, there is no guarantee that any installed software will work properly, if at all.
Info You should become familiar with the manual build process in order to be prepared to troubleshoot problems.
Using GUI Pamac
Open Pamac — the name in menu is Add/Remove Software and navigate to the Preferences page. You will be required to enter your password to access it.At Preferences page → select the Third Party tab → and move the slider to enable AUR support. Be sure you have the necessary files for building applications from source
Using commandline Pamac
Info It is strongly recommended to follow this link AUR website and examine the relevant page(s) for any and all software intended to be installed.
These pages contain comments from both existing users and package developers, which may provide valuable information (such as, warnings and/or solutions to problems). To search for and install software packages from the AUR, the syntax is:
For example, if wishing to install Google Chrome — first follow this link to all Google Chrome build scripts and verify which package you want to build.Or you can ask pamac — for Google Chrome candidates. Just use the search command and Google Chrome as the query. Look over the results or narrow the search parameters — just remember pamac cannot tell you of any issues with build scripts — only the relevant page. E.g. following this link to the buildscript for Google Chrome
In the example we choose the standard version of Google Chrome. To build the google-chrome package with pamac enter the following and press enter
You will be presented with the outcome of the chosen build with all dependencies and you will be asked a couple of questions.
- Query to edit build files. This is a precaution to verify that the build scripts does not contain malicious actions.
- Query to continue download and install dependencies then download the sources, build and install the app.
- You will be asked for your password before anything happens.
Using GUI Octopi
See this guide for enabling AUR support in Octopi.
Installing from the AUR by hand
Manual
To do that follow the steps given below:
This will build the package and pull in any dependencies needed. Note: it won’t pull a dependency from the AUR, only from the Manjaro Repos.. If you list the folder content
you’ll probably find a few new files. You’re interested in the one that ends with .pkg.tar.zst
And you’ve done it. the safest way to install from the AUR. This is essentially what most install scripts do for you.
Note: Instead of using sudo pacman -U google-chrome-ver.rel.bugfix.build-pkgrel.pkg.zst can also use:
Note: To combine above steps into one:
Upgrading the packages installed from the AUR
The following command will upgrade all packages on the system including AUR builds
Pacman Overview
Manjaro’s package manager, Pamac ships with most Manjaro editions. All Manjaro editions include pacman, the package manager from upstream Arch Linux. Pacman includes some advanced features not found in Pamac.
- Pacman is already installed in Manjaro Linux by default
- Pacman is mainly developed/maintained by Arch Linux developers
- Pacman can only be used from the command line, if you would prefer a graphical package manager please see Pamac or Octopi
- Pacman can only use the official Manjaro repository. There are separate articles available for accessing the Arch User Repository(AUR), using flatpaks and using snaps
To update the package database and update all packages on the system
To force a full refresh of the package database and update all packages on the system. You must do this when switching branches or switching mirrors.
To force a full refresh of the package database, update all packages on the system and allow packages to be downgraded. Downgrading should be only be needed when switching to an older branch. For example, switching from Testing to Stable.
To install the packages with the broken dependency or with the deadlock dependency. Two or more packages need to be updated and first is blocking second and second is blocking first one. Use carefully!
To search the Manjaro repositories for available packages you can use the command pacman -Ss keyword . It will search both the package name and the description for the keyword. For example, to search for packages containing the keyword smplayer you could use:
You can search your installed packages in the same manner using -Qs instead of -Ss . To search your installed packages for smplayer:
Once you have found a package you can use pacman -Qi to get more information about an installed packages or pacman -Si for packages in the repos. Following the example above you could use
Finally, for a list of all installed packages on your system, enter the following command:
Warning Never install a package without updating the system first. On a rolling release this can lead to an unbootable system
To install a software package, the basic syntax is pacman -S packagename . However, installing a package without updating the system will lead to a partial upgrade situation so all the examples here will use pacman -Syu packagename which will install the package and ensure the system is up to date. For example, to install smplayer the command is:
You will then be presented a list of software to install. You may notice this list has more packages than you requested. This is because many packages also have dependencies which are packages that must be installed in order for the software you selected to function properly.
Pacman can also directly install packages from the local system or a location on the internet. The format of that command is pacman -U packagelocation . For example, to install a copy of your package cache you could do something like:
Alternatively, you could get it directly from one of Manjaro’s mirrors:
user $ sudo pacman -U https://mirror.alpix.eu/manjaro/stable/community/x86_64/smplayer-19.5.0-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz COPY TO CLIPBOARD
Warning When using pacman -U it is up to you to ensure that the package you are installing is fully compatible with your system.
Warning Always review the package list before confirming when removing packages. If you are not careful you can easily remove your entire desktop due to dependencies.
To remove a software package, the basic syntax is sudo pacman -R packagename . We could remove the smplayer package we installed above with:
This will remove the package, but will leave all the dependencies behind. If you also want to remove the unneeded dependencies you could use pacman -Rsu packagename as seen in this example:
Sometimes when you try to remove a package you will not be able to because there are other packages which depend on it. You can use pacman -Rc packagename to remove a package and everything that depends on it. Be careful to heed the above warning when using this option.
The most nuclear option is pacman -Rcs packagename . This will remove everything that depends on packagename and continue to do so on its dependencies. This should really only be used in exceptional circumstances such as when removing an entire desktop environment and trying not to leave anything behind.
Pacman usually also creates backup configuration files when deleting packages. To remove those, you can add n to any of the examples above. For example: