On Arch Linux, there are a number of apps you have to get from the “community” repo. Yaourt (Yet Another User Repository Tool) is such an advanced CLI tool for installing software packages from the AUR repository.

AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) is a place where hundreds of software packages are located. It can search, install and upgrade the packages installed from AUR interactively. You can also directly build and install packages from the AUR or ABS source.

Yaourt is such a powerful tool, yet it doesn’t come up pre-installed on Arch and any Arch-based distro. We have to get the source from AUR repository and build it by ourselves. Let’s get started.

Getting Yaourt

Make sure that your system is ready with the following prerequisites –

 sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git wget yajl

Change active directory –

cd /tmp

Grab and install “package-query” –

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/package-query.git

cd package-query/

makepkg -si && cd /tmp/

Now, your system is ready for grabbing and building Yaourt. Run the following commands –

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yaourt.git

cd yaourt/

makepkg -si

Using Yaourt

At first, update the Yaourt database –

sudo yaourt -Sy

Install a package using Yaourt –

sudo yaourt -S snapd

The following command will gather and show stats about your installed packages along with configured repositories on your Arch system –

yaourt --stats

For all the features, you can find out all of them on the “man” page –

man yaourt

Enjoy!