What if you find an application you like and it is not on the AUR.
Make the PKGBUILD yourself and put it on the AUR so others can benefit from your work and maintenance.
We take gitfiend as example.
We have no notion if it is a good application or anything but it worked instantly and looks great. It has a nice user interface and even a dark theme. It provides all the information about your github and you can easily navigate inside it.
So we will give it a try.
All changes to a github can be read online on github.com. You can also read in gitfiend.
First you always check if the package exists on AUR.
No doubles allowed.
Gitfiend is not on the AUR yet.
Start by reading pkgbuilds from other people and gradually you will start to understand more and more.
We try to find a pkgbuild where a debian package is downloaded and installed.
We reuse the spotify pkgbuild to make our PKGBUILD for gitfiend.
We go over all the lines and change and/or delete the lines.
Check the video to know more.
In the next video we put the PKGBUILD online on the AUR.
The step we have skipped is the part were you need to be able to authenticate on AUR. You need an account and the permission to push it to the AUR. See wiki.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR_submission_guidelines
Creating an AUR package that does not exist yet is done with this command :
git clone ssh://aur@aur.archlinux.org/gitfiend.git
Then we add some files to make our work easy.
- .gitignore
- git.sh
Now we can install this package with
yay gitfiend
After creating the pkgbuild I got help from yochananmarqos on https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gitfiend/.
That is how the Linux world works – helping each other and making the it better for everyone.
Remember we were thinking about if there were dependencies for this particular package.
At the time we were on ArcoLinux and all the dependencies were (by coincidence) already installed so gitfiend just worked.
Let us analyze how to figure out what dependencies this package requires and changed in version 2 compared to version 1.
We discovered that gitfiend is getting its data from the internet.
If we create a PKGBUILD we better test it too in an “almost virgin like” Arch Linux environment.
This way we will detect if there are any missing dependencies or extra issues.
We have detected an extra issue on this Arch Linux installation.
We need to add
chmod 4755 /opt/GitFiend/chrome-sandbox
to the PKGBUILD.
This will bring our version to nr 3.
General Package Building Information
On the AUR you will find thousands of PKGBUILDS.
You can use their PKGBUILDS or make one yourself.
AUR = Arch User Repository – A user is someone like you and me.
Here are some interesting links if you want to make your own ‘recipe’ or PKGBUILD.
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/creating_packages
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_packaging_standards
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PKGBUILD
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/makepkg
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System