How to install yay the AUR helper

This is for Arch Linux only and you can’t live without it. Basically the yay or the AUR helper expands the packages that you can install to your Arch Linux, without using the snap or flatpak package manager.

This is optional, but I always do this, when I install software from “untrusted” sources or if the software needs to be “compiled”, so make sure that you have a folder in your download folder.

Side note: If you need to install .deb packages, that we don’t recommend to use on Arch, but if you are running Debian and if you download and install a .deb package, we would recommend to run the installation from either the /tmp folder or the /opt folder. Debian doesn’t always like if the installation media/software or package is under the /home/<username>/Downloads folder.

cd Downloads
mkdir yay
cd yay

Make sure that the system is up to date

sudo pacman -Syu

Install the prerequisites with the following commands, because you need git and base-devel packages to build packages from the AUR

sudo pacman -S git base-devel

Clone the yay repository from AUR

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

Build and install yay

cd yay
makepgk -si

Verify installation

yay --version

Source(s):

• It’s foss