The Aura Package Manager For Arch Linux

do you use arch linux or arch linux based distribution like manjaro endeavor arco if you do probably the biggest reason you use an arch-based system is because of the aur the arch user repository it's this gigantic repository of user-submitted software and it makes arch and all these arch-based distributions have the biggest availability of software of any of the gnu slash linux distributions and one of the problems with especially mainline arch is out of the box you can't really install aur packages or they make it a little more difficult you actually have to physically go and grab the package builds from the internet you know download them to your machine and then install them side load them essentially with pac-man so pac-man knows about these packages these third-party packages that you're installing but there are these programs called aur helpers and two of the most popular are yay and paru a matter of fact most arch-based systems already have a aur helper installed manjaro arco endeavor most of them already have yay and or paru already installed to make installing aur packages much easier but today i wanted to show you an alternative aur helper called aura now what is aura aura is a aur helper that is written in haskell and i know some people have a real problem with haskell programs because haskell's got all these dependencies on the haskell programming language and the haskell compiler but every programming language has these kinds of dependencies right your c programs have dependencies on c libraries and the c compiler and same thing with python and lua and all these other programs that you have no problem installing on your system don't be scared of haskell it won't hurt you you you can have haskell on the system matter of fact if you're already using things like xmo nad xmode bar pandoc shell check those are all haskell programs fantastic haskell programs you probably need to know about anyway so just quit trying to avoid haskell it's inevitable you're gonna have to install some haskell at some point on your system so the source code for aura is hosted over on github and it looks like it's a very active project with a lot of contributors has actually got a really nice documentation here on github so what is aura aura is a package manager for arch linux so they claim to be more than just an aur helper they're taking the moniker package manager and the reason they're doing this is because aura actually does do more than just install packages from the aur if i go down here to some of the sample usage this is just a list of some of the basic commands with aura there are snapshot commands so aura has the ability what to store every installed package it gets a list of all your installed packages it stores that in a json record and then if you wanted to you could always restore from that saved record something goes wrong and you want to go back to the previous snapshot that you had of those particular pieces of software you can actually do that with or that's really cool you can also downgrade packages very easily with aura that is something very useful because i sometimes have run into the the need to downgrade packages not too often but occasionally especially doing you know like production work here making videos like my version of caden live they'll have a big update and the new version is kind of buggy or it doesn't quite work right you know the way the old version did so i'll just downgrade to the old version of caden live at least for a little while before finally moving on to to the next version once they get the bugs worked out then yeah i'll go ahead and make the upgrade but for a while a lot of times i just stay on the old versions or also makes it very easy to search through the pacman logs you can also manage orphan packages orphans or these packages that are no longer needed on your system they were installed as dependencies for other programs but you already uninstalled that program so now you have these unneeded programs just sitting on the system aura can get rid of those orphaned packages for you aura also allows you to analyze the package builds most aur helpers typically have you read the package build anyway but aura has some neat stuff in it and aura has the ability to let you do a hot edit on a package build meaning i can edit the package build before the installation which is a really neat feature so let me switch over to my desktop and let's play around a little bit with aura so i'm going to open a terminal and let me go ahead and zoom in here so you guys can see everything so up front we should talk about how aura handles the differences between standard packages and the standard repos and aur packages because you have two sets of flags which really makes it nice because you never get confused exactly where the package is coming from is it in the standard repos is it in the arch user repository so if you do sudo aura and aura needs sudo privileges unlike yay and paru which don't make you type sudo but later when you actually do need sudo privileges when the package gets installed on the system yay and paru ask you for a root password for aura you do this up front just like you do with pacman so do sudo aura dash s to install from the standard repositories so just like pac-man dash capital s or a capital s and i know h top is in the standard repository so let me give it my root password of course i already have h top installed but that's the way that would work now let me rerun that command and this time instead of dash capital s do dash capital a for install from the aur now h top is not in the aur so if this fails but htm which is a h top alternative is in the aur so now sudo aura dash capital a htm will find htm in the aur and it will of course build it for me i have no idea how long this installation will take it complains that htm and h-top are in conflict so i've got to remove htop so i will give it permission to remove htop and now htm is installed but if i wanted to install hdm with aura capital s remember that's standard repository packages html is not in there so again target not found so you do have different commands depending on which repo you want to grab packages from and of course all your standard pacman flags work for example if i did a sudo or a dash capital s lowercase y lowercase u this of course is going to sync the repositories and then update all the packages on the system from the standard repositories not from the arch user repository i'm going to decline taking that system update now if i wanted to do this by upgrading all the aur packages i would do a similar command i would do sudo instead of dash s do dash capital a for the aur packages not the standard repo packages i also don't need the y because the y syncs the repositories there's nothing to sync with the aur right it's not you don't sync aur repositories and then you to update those packages so it's basically what this command does and it's saying aura update available do we want to update aura first so aura is a aur package so we should update it and then once it updates itself it should then allow us to update all the aur packages on my system i don't know how many aur packages i actually have installed on my system probably not that many even though i love the aur i don't find myself needing it that much because honestly arch linux the standard repos you know they're starting to move a lot of the more popular aur packages over to the standard repositories now it's one of the things with the aur if you go to that aur website and look up packages you do have the ability to vote upvote packages so you get very popular packages in there like the brave browser that i use that is aur package and it's probably the most popular aur package in the aur so eventually the arch guys will probably get around to moving that thing to the standard repos where honestly it belongs now it took a couple of minutes to build aura there so being a aur package and being haskell you know it does have to rebuild and then recompile but it really just took like two minutes it wasn't a very long compilation there for aura so now that we've updated aura itself let's rerun sudo aura dash capital a lowercase u to update the aur packages and yeah i've got a actually a lot of thank you more packages on here so i'm going to decline that update there some of the other pacman flags that work with aura i could do a search of all the packages installed on my system i don't need sudo privileges of course to do this because these packages are already installed it's just giving me a list of them so i do dash capital q lowercase q and it spits out all the programs that are installed on my system i can pipe that through wc which is the word count program and do dash l for line count and i have a very very bloated system 1880 packages on my system that's because i have like you know 12 15 different window managers installed in various programming languages so i've got a lot installed on this machine now another useful aur flag that you can use is you could do sudo aura dash capital a and lower case i for information i want some information about brave bin i believe is the ur package for brave and that should give me yeah it gives me all the information about brave including dependencies popularity 458 people have voted for it and that gives me a description and all of that now if we get back into the documentation a little bit one of the most interesting things about aura is the snapshotting feature where it takes a snapshot it basically throws all of your installed packages it gets a list puts them in a json file and then later if you wanted to restore those packages restore from that snapshot you do have the ability so what i've done off camera i've actually run this command a few times now just to have more than one snapshot saved so sudo or a dash capital b it says saved package state and because i've run it i don't know six or seven times off camera now if i do sudo or a dash capital b lowercase r for restore hey which snapshot do you want to restore from and it looks like other than the ones i've played around with today i actually installed aura way back in january i didn't do a video about it but i played around with it it looked like i took a snapshot way back in january i can only imagine what would happen if i tried to do that i'm going to choose the most recent one number seven which there probably isn't any changes so it probably yeah no packages need changing yeah i don't want to restore what from way back in january and that would be kind of crazy a matter of fact what i should do is get rid of the old backups because that could be a problem if i accidentally restore from one of the old backups so you can do sudo or capital b lowercase c and then give it a number and it will only save the last however many number of records you want saved for example three and now that i've done that three package states will be kept and the rest of them will be removed yes or no by default yes is the answer so just hit enter and now when i do sudo or dash capital b l to list the json files the backups there are only three now and it got rid of that ancient one from way back in january we also mentioned that aura can handle orphaned files so if i wanted to get a list of the orphans on the system do sudo aura dash capital o and there's actually quite a number of orphans on here now do i really want them to get rid of these orphans i'm just looking at the list to see if there's anything and you should do this too because sometimes you when you try to remove orphaned packages sometimes you'll be surprised what shows up in there things like i don't know the linux kernel or systemd you know things that you really don't want to remove you'd be surprised but none of this looks like it's really important rust is here but that's only really needed if i've got something installed that needs to compile i don't think i compile any rust programs that are installed electron is here electron 12. i don't think i really need that c make that's a make dependency i'm not too worried about that i think i can get rid of these so what i would do to uninstall all the orphan packages do sudo aura dash capital o lowercase j and then it's going to ask for confirmation do i really want to get rid of these it's going to get rid of urx vt which is a terminal emulator that is not i wonder why it found that as an orphaned package because that's not really a dependency on anything but it's a terminal emulator i don't use ur xvt though so i'll go ahead and get rid of it if i find that i need it later i can always reinstall it now other than this very short cursory video i did and the github documentation over on github if you need more documentation for aura they have taken the time to write a really nice man page anything you want to know about aura can be found in the man page it gives you all the flags all the options including some stuff that's not over on the the github page for example dash dash hot edit even though i didn't play with this uh that would allow you when you're viewing the package build you could actually do a edit of the package build you know before you actually install the program that's really interesting especially in aur packages a lot of times i you will find some that are broken they just will not install and the reason they won't install sometimes is their mistakes in the package build and the ability for you to just go in there and fix the mistake so it'll actually build correctly it's a very nice feature so i think i'm going to start using aura as my aur helper just package manager in general because most of the backman commands also work in aura too so aur helpers i've used so many over the years way back in the day of course i started with the howard like most people yeah or was the aur helper but it died right it eventually became yay yet another yoward which then became paru uh paru is a fork of yeah still there but you get two competing projects essentially and then i've also tried trison i've also tried uh many aur helpers that are now dead pak aur i think was one way back in the day but aura i really like it because it's unique that snapshotting feature very unique i love that i love the removal of the orphan packages it makes that a lot easier than using the standard pacman commands to remove orphans which involves quite a bit of code actually to make that happen so if you're looking to try out a new aur helper give aura a try and don't be afraid of the haskell dependencies now before i go let me thank a few special people i need to thank the producers of this episode ebsy gabe james mitchell paul scott west county allen chuck curt david dilling gregory heiko mike aryan alexander peace arts and federal polytech raver red prophet stephen and willie these guys they're my highest yeared patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick look at the aura package manager would not be possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon because i don't have any corporate sponsors i'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work and want to help me out consider supporting distrotube over on patreon all right guys peace and if you're going to install haskell for aura might as well install xmoned

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 35,760

Keywords: arch linux, arch linux tutorial, arch install, arch user repository, linux help, arch linux 2021, arch linux aur, arch user repository manjaro, aur helper, aura aur helper, aura, haskell, aur programs, aur packages, arch pacman, pacman package manager, aura package manager, linux tutorial, arch user repository (aur), arch pacman update package, aur packages arch, arch pacman remove orphans, yay aur helper, paru aur helper, distrotube

Id: xPRJWHghWM8

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fosskers]

Hi there, author of Aura here! Thank you very much for featuring Aura in this video!

As a number of people here have mentioned, the aura-bin package is the recommended one to install (right now). Also, you only need sudo for commands that actually need to write to the filesystem. You can get quite far without sudo, and Aura will warn you if you're trying to do something that needs it.

Other than the README and man page, Aura also has a User Guide: https://fosskers.github.io/aura/

Let me know if you have any specific questions!

[u/[deleted]]

Seems great, but being new to Arch I'm still kind of scared with moving from pacman, especially after starting to get the "hang", if there is any, of it.

[u/Phydoux]

So, let me get this straight. Of all the people using Linux, only 458 people have voted for brave-bin? Doesn't seem like much here really. I know this is just the Arch repositories but that number seems a bit under inflated for some reason.