AUR Packages that get sufficient user votes can be promoted to a regular Arch repository called the community repository.īut we'll carry on and look a little deeper. These can be open or closed source packages, or even commercial software. The AUR allows anyone to create a PKGBUILD for a piece of software they'd like to make available for other Arch users. The AUR entry for those packages only holds a PKGBUILD file that downloads the pre-compiled binary to your computer.

But those binaries are not hosted in the AUR, they're stored elsewhere on the internet. The pacman tool is called automatically to install the software from the package archive.Īt the risk of introducing some confusion, some AUR packages do deliver pre-compiled binaries. The PKGBUILD instructions download source code files and other files that are required to create the package archive. Work together in a similar fashion to a MAKEFILE and the make If you're familiar with compiling on the command line, a PKGBUILD file and makepkg Runs, it looks for a file called 'PKGBUILD.' If it finds one, it opens it and follows the instructions inside it to create a software package archive on your computer. These are shell scripts that are run by the Arch makepkg The AUR hosts package build files, called PKGBUILDs.

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