The Arch User Repository (AUR) provides thousands of user-submitted packages, but each package in the AUR is just a git repository containing at minimum a PKGBUILD recipe. To install a package, you first check out the repository and review it, then use makepkg to install dependencies, download/verify the source material, and build it. You can then install the built package directly with pacman -U.
The option of an AUR helper
This process starts to get unwieldy once you’re using lots of inter-related packages from the AUR. At this point, people often start using an AUR helper like yay, which abstracts away much of the manual work that’s normally needed when using the AUR.
However, if you’re trying to be as selective as possible when using the AUR, an AUR helper might be overkill; a slightly more primitive solution would be sufficient.
Sticking with pacman
It’s possible to set up a local repository, and configure pacman to use it. I do this in /srv/packages (a location that’s readily accessible to pacman’s alpm download user).
Building packages into the local repository
The first step is to configure makepkg to set up the local repo as the destination for built packages:
grep -B 1 ^PKGDEST /etc/makepkg.conf
#-- Destination: specify a fixed directory where all packages will be placed
PKGDEST=/srv/packages
We then need to compile a repository database file that indexes all these packages:
cd /srv/packages
repo-add --new local-aur.db.tar.zst *.pkg.tar.zst
This needs to be re-run each time a package is [re-]built with makepkg.
Configuring pacman
We can add the following to /etc/pacman.conf so it will synchronize packages from our local repo (as well as core and extra).
[local-aur]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = file:///srv/packages
We can now search for and install packages from our local repository just like we would with any other! 🎉
Checking for AUR updates
As AUR packages get updated, you have to manually update your git checkouts. I do this with a script to iterate over all my local versions, which I keep in ~/AUR:
fd -td -d1 -x bash -c "echo -en '{}\n ' && git -C {} pull" \; . ~/AUR
I can then review any changes, and run makepkg / repo-add / pacman -Syu to install.