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How to Install Yay on Arch Linux

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In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Yay on Arch Linux. Yay stands for Yet another yogurt. An aur helper that allows you to manage packages on Arch Linux.

Features

Perform advanced dependency solving
Download PKGBUILDs from ABS or AUR
Tab-complete the AUR
Query user up-front for all input (prior to starting builds)
Narrow search terms (yay linux header will first search linux and then narrow on header)
Find matching package providers during search and allow selection
Remove make dependencies at the end of the build process
Run without sourcing PKGBUILD

Install Yay via an Aur Helper

If you have an aur helper already installed on your system, you can install yay via that aur helper. Let’s assume you are using trizen, so to install yay you need to run

trizen -S yay

Install Yay Manually

Installing a package manually it’s 100x safer than installing something via a third party tool. Even if you are new to Arch, and installing something manually might look too complicated to you, believe me it’s not. Learn how to build packages manually in order to avoid security risks, just because an aur helper can install something “faster” it doesn’t mean it’s the proper way of doing it. Better safe than sorry.

Git must be installed on your system in order to be able to clone the repository.

sudo pacman -S git

Step 1 – Clone the Git Repository First

Run the following command, to clone the git repository.

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

Step 2 – Browse to the Downloaded Repository

cd yay

Step 3 – Build the Package

Once you have cloned the repository, run the following command to start building the package manually.

makepkg -si

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install yay on Arch Linux, via two different methods. And why the manual method it’s the recommended instead of using aur helpers.