How to install yay(AUR helper) in Manjaro/Arch Linux

Yay – Yet another Yogurt is an AUR Helper written in Go. It’s objective is providing an interface of pacman with minimal user input, yaourt like search and with almost no dependencies.

Yaourt has been discontinued in favour of yay. Yaourt (Yet Another User Repository Tool) is an advanced command line tool for installing packages on Arch Linux. It is a powerful wrapper for Pacman, the standard package management utility for Arch Linux with extended features and remarkable AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) support.

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Features of yay

• Advanced dependency solving
• PKGBUILD downloading from ABS or AUR
• Completions for AUR packages
• Query user up-front for all input (prior to starting builds)
• Narrow search (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

Installing yay

Yay publishes releases for each version in its Github releases page here https://github.com/Jguer/yay/releases. We are going to get the latest release for our system. As of the writting of this post, the latest version is v11.0.2. To download the latest for my architecture, I use this command:

curl -LO https://github.com/Jguer/yay/releases/download/v11.0.2/yay_11.0.2_x86_64.tar.gz

Then extract the downloaded package:

tar -xzf yay_11.0.2_x86_64.tar.gz

Finally, move the yay binary to /usr/local/bin/ so it can be accessed without typing fullpath:

sudo mv yay_11.0.2_x86_64/yay /usr/local/bin/

Using Yay in Arch Linux and Manjaro

Once yay is installed, let us explore some common commands/functions we can achieve with it.

To upgrade all packages on the system:

yay -Syu

To include development packages during the upgrade run.

yay -Syu --devel --timeupdate

As with any other AUR helpers, you can install the packages using the command.

sudo yay -S code

The above command installs visual studio code.

To remove a package using yay use the command.

yay -Rns package_name

To clean up all unwanted dependencies on your system, issue the command.

yay -Yc

If you want to print system statistics using yay, run.

yay -Ps

Conclusion

In this guide we learnt how to install yay in a Manjaro/Arch Linux