Archlinux custom package

Are you still installing packages via curl, that a website dictated you?

Quick example

To be able to post a package on AUR its source code should be downloadable. Lets review the package cf-terraforming which wasn’t on AUR before. The build is available at github release pages. You can specify the package version and replace the link path with it.

Create a file name PKGBUILD with the following content:

# Maintainer: Andrew Koidan <[email protected]>
pkgname=cf-terraforming
pkgbase=cf-terraforming
pkgver=0.12.0
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Cloudflare Terraforming"
url="https://github.com/cloudflare/cf-terraforming"
license=("unknown")
arch=('x86_64')

source=(
    "${pkgname}-${pkgver}-amd64.tar.gz::https://github.com/cloudflare/${pkgname}/releases/download/v${pkgver}/${pkgname}_${pkgver}_linux_amd64.tar.gz"
)

md5sums=('c53e9337397761a04d963343c6daf7ff')
sha256sums=('c2955c03994e38c4628c6445dfb760e4c6ee93319f621e9254a24440eb17aa33')

prepare() {
  tar -xvzf "${pkgname}-${pkgver}-amd64.tar.gz" 
}


package() {
  install -D -m755 "${srcdir}/cf-terraforming" "${pkgdir}/usr/bin/cf-terraforming"
}

Now you can do makepkg which will build pkg in the current directory

Why is this usefull

Keep the system clean. You can track any file to which package it belows:

$ pacman -Qo /usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/bash is owned by bash 5.1.016-3

You can track which files your package has:

$ pacman -Ql bash
bash /etc/
bash /etc/bash.bashrc
# ...

You can find which pkg you need to install if you know which file you need by a filename:

# pacman -S pkgfile && updatedb
$ pkgfile bash
core/bash
extra/apparmor
community/grunt-cli
community/gulp
community/misfortune

Upload package to AUR

Well, lets help other people now, and save the code somewhere so we can install it in the future.

• Check the wiki
• Sign up on AUR
• Upload your RSA public key to aur
• Create local git repo from a remote one. Replace pkgbase with your package name. Otherwise you would waste 20 mins like me fooling around ;)

git -c init.defaultbranch=master clone ssh://[email protected]/pkgbase.git

• Generate src info with:

$ makepkg --printsrcinfo > .SRCINFO

• Commit and push to the repo.
• Wait a few minutes until package becomes available