Maur - A minimal AUR helper

published 2019-11-13

This post is about the Arch User Repository. If you're not an Arch user, probably just move along ;)

There are lots of AUR helpers in existence already but, in the best traditions of open source, none of them work exactly how I want an AUR helper to work, so I created a new one.

Here it is: https://github.com/stilvoid/maur

maur (pronounced like "more") is tiny. At the time of writing, it's 49 lines of bash. It also has very few features.

Here is the list of features:

  • Help text when you type maur --help or maur -h
  • A list of packages in the AUR when you type maur with no arguments
  • Help you install a package when you type maur <package name>

The "help" when installing a package is this, and nothing more:

  • Clone the package's AUR repository
  • Open the PKGBUILD in your default editor
  • Ask if you want to continue installing
  • If you do, run makepkg -si

If you think maur needs more features, use a different AUR helper.

If you find bugs, please submit an issue or, even better, a pull request.

Example usage

Searching the AUR

If you want to search for a package in the AUR, you can grep for it ;)

maur | grep maur

Installing a package

If you want to install a package, for example yay:

maur yay

Upgrading a package

Upgrade a package is the same as installing one. This will upgrade maur:

maur maur