AUR Repo for Arch Linux

- 3 mins read

As I was working on creating my automated installation script for Arch Linux, I realized that I would also like to install packages from the AUR. Building the packages in the installation would be time-consuming, and a bit cumbersome due needing to make the packages as a non-root user, but needing to be a root user to install the packages. Having a repo with the packages already pre-built sounds like a much better option. Plus I can continue to use this repo after the installation and let my server spend the time building the packages, rather than me waiting at the command line.

Setting up the repo

I decided to use aurutils as it was the most feature complete AUR helper that supported setting up a local repository. I already had an HTTP server running on my server, all I had to do was set up the local repo and install the packages I wanted with aurutils.

  1. Install aurutils
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/aurutils.git
cd aurutils
makepkg -si

If you get an error unknown key error you’ll have to import the PGP key.

gpg -vvv --recv-key 6BC26A17B9B7018A
  1. Create the directory to use as a local repo.
mkdir /aur-repo

This can be where ever you like, I used /aur-repo in this example.

  1. Initialize the repo
repo-add /aur-repo/mitchell-aur.db.tar.xz
  1. Tell pacman about the repo Add the following to your pacman config file, /etc/pacman.conf
[mitchell-aur]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://mwcaisse.com/aur-repo/

Replace the Server property with the URL to your local repo. I already had a HTTP server setup, I created a symlink from /aur-repo to my server’s content directory. ln -s /srv/http/aur-repo /aur-repo

  1. Install the first package I installed aurutils as the first package, but you can install any AUR package, and you can install multiple at the same time.
aur sync -d mitchell-aur --root /aur-repo/ --no-confirm --noview aurutils
  • --noview prevents aurutils from opening a text editor to show build files for inspection
  • --no-confirm is passed to makepkg and prevents waiting for user input. Both of these options are helpful to run this in an automated state as it will not prompt for user input.

Future Plans

This setup works as a proof of concept and to test it out with my installation script. There are a few things that it could do better:

  • Automate the updating of packages. Create a script or other mechanism to automatically update all of the packages in the repo once every few days.
  • Sign the packages for added security that they haven’t been tampered with or someone else didn’t upload packages
  • Build the packages in a docker container or other clean environment. A docker container won’t have any unneeded packages that could create dependency issues when installed on another machine. It will also be easier to ensure all of the dependent packages are up to date.

References: