Yay – Yet Another Reliable AUR Helper Written In GO

Howdy Arch Users! I've got a good news for you. Today, I stumbled upon yet another reliable AUR helper called "Yay". Yep! the name of this AUR helper is Yay. In the past, I was using Pacaur for installing AUR packages. It did a great job and I really liked it. I have also used some other AUR helpers such as Packer and Yaourt as well. But, they are all now discontinued and not recommended to use anymore. After reading about Yay features, I thought to give "Yay" a try and see how things works. So, here we go!

Yay - Yet another Yaourt, an AUR Helper written in Go

As the title says, Yay, stands for yet another yaourt, is a new reliable AUR helper written in GO language. It provides an interface for pacman and also it has almost no dependencies. It provides yaourt like search feature and minimizes the user input greatly. Another notable feature is you can choose which application to install or update. Also, It supports AUR tab completion, so just type few letters of an AUR package and hit enter KEY to complete the name.

Install Yay

To install Yay on any Arch-based systems, run the following commands one by one.

$ sudo pacman -S git

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git

$ cd yay

$ makepkg -si

Usage

Like any other AUR helpers, the typical way to install a package from AUR is:

$ yay -S <package-name-here>

Example:

$ yay -S mplayer

To search for a package in AUR and official repositories, use -Ss flag like below.

$ yay -Ss mplayer
aur/animewatch-pyqt5 4.2.0-0 (0) 
 An Audio/Video Manager and Front End for mpv/mplayer with special emphasis on Anime Collection
aur/delta-media-player 1.16-3 (0) 
 IPTV program stream player for DMPlayer
aur/phonon-mplayer-git 20120714.7217499-1 (0) 
 Mplayer backend for phonon, the multimedia API of KDE. (Qt4 only) GIT version)
aur/mplayer-autocmd-git 4.r18.3157ade-1 (0) 
 Per-file options and keybindings for mpv
[...]

We can also view information of a package in AUR or official repositories.

$ yay -Si mplayer
No request type/data specified.
[sudo] password for sk: 
Repository : extra
Name : mplayer
Version : 37916-2
Description : Media player for Linux
Architecture : x86_64
URL : http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
Licenses : GPL
Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : desktop-file-utils ttf-font enca libxss a52dec libvpx lirc libx264
 libmng libdca aalib libxinerama smbclient jack libmad libcaca
 libxxf86dga faac faad2 libxvmc mpg123 libcdio-paranoia rtmpdump
 libdvdnav ffmpeg
Optional Deps : None
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Download Size : 2.15 MiB
Installed Size : 4.98 MiB
Packager : Maxime Gauduin <[email protected]>
Build Date : Mon 27 Mar 2017 12:44:49 AM IST
Validated By : MD5 Sum SHA-256 Sum Signature

To update all packages from AUR and official repositories, use -Syu flag.

$ yay -Syu

A good feature of yay is if you pass this command with no operation, then it will displays menu for package install selection.

For instance, when I run the following command (Note that there is no operation specified), it shows me the menu for package selection.

$ yay mplayer

I had to type a number to install the respective package. Also, we can specify multiple packages with a space separation.

To install any packages without confirmations (without user interventions, of course), use "--noconfirm" option.

$ yay -S --noconfirm <package-name>

To print the list of packages that needs to be updated, run:

$ yay -Pu
pywebkitgtk 1.1.8-3 -> 1.1.8-5
webkitgtk2 2.4.11-6 -> 2.4.11-12

To remove unwanted dependencies, use -Yc flag as shown below.

$ yay -Yc
[sudo] password for sk: 
checking dependencies...
warning: dependency cycle detected:
warning: lib32-mesa will be removed after its lib32-libglvnd dependency

Packages (34) deepin-qml-widgets-2.3.6-1 go-tools-2:1.10+2306+25101aad-1
gobject-introspection-1.56.1-1 gperf-3.1-1 js-24.2.0-4 lib32-icu-61.1-1
lib32-libdrm-2.4.92-1 lib32-libelf-0.171-1 lib32-libglvnd-1.0.0-1
lib32-libpciaccess-0.14-1 lib32-libxdamage-1.1.4-3 lib32-libxfixes-5.0.3-1
lib32-libxml2-2.9.8-2 lib32-libxshmfence-1.3-1 lib32-libxxf86vm-1.1.4-2
lib32-llvm-libs-6.0.1-1 lib32-lm_sensors-3.4.0-1 lib32-mesa-18.1.3-1
lib32-ncurses-6.1-1 lib32-readline-7.0.003-1 lib32-wayland-1.15.0-1
muparser-2.2.5-3 python-beaker-1.10.0-1 python-dae-1.0.2-1
python-docutils-0.14-1 python-jieba-0.39-1 python-mako-1.0.7-1
python-markupsafe-1.0-1 python-sip-4.19.12-4 python-xlib-0.23-1
python2-sip-4.19.12-4 rust-1:1.27.1-1 setconf-0.7.5-2 sip-4.19.12-4

Total Removed Size: 533.82 MiB

:: Do you want to remove these packages? [Y/n] y

For more details about yay, refer man pages.

$ man yay

As far as I tested, Yay is fully functioning and works well. I think I am going to stick with Yay for a while.

Resource:

• Yay GitHub page