Yay: an excellent helper for AUR and an alternative to Yaourt

Arch Linux users and its derivatives You will know that the use of Yaourt is no longer recommended, because this AUR assistant no longer receives support and is discontinued, so it is recommended to use some other assistant.

That is why the day of today we are going to share with you an excellent AUR helper with you, which we can consider to be an excellent replacement for Yaourt and even for pacaur that is also discontinued.

The assistant we will talk about is Yay (Yet another Yaourt), this is a new helper for reliable AUR which is written in the GO programming language.

About Yay

Yay we provides an interface for Pacman and it is a wizard that requires almost no dependencies. It is based on the design of yaourt, apacman and pacaur.

Another feature that we can highlight of this assistant is that has autocomplete function, so just type a few initial letters and this wizard will help you complete the name.

Between Its main characteristics can be highlighted:

• Yay download the PKGBUILD from ABS or AUR.
• Supports search narrowing and does not get the origin of PKGBUILD.
• The binary has no additional dependencies than pacman.
• Provides an advanced dependency solver and removes make dependencies at the end of the build process.
• It supports colored output when you enable the Color option in the /etc/pacman.conf file.

How to install Yay on Arch Linux and derivatives?

Si you want to install this wizard for AUR on your system, you can follow the following indications that we share below.

This process is valid for any distribution derived from Arch Linux as well.

In case you have Yaourt or some other assistant you can install it with the help of it, In Yaourt's example, just type:

yaourt -S yay

If not, we can build the package, first we must open a terminal and in it we will type the following command:

sudo pacman -S git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay.git
cd yay
makepkg -si

And that's it, the wizard is installed, now you just have to start using it.

Basic use of Yay

This wizard like others, they use a syntax quite similar to Pacman, so its use is really not difficult at all.

The basic commands of use are, for example, To install a package or application in AUR:

yay -S <package-name>

En case you want to search for an application within the official repositories and AUR at the same time, we add the flag "s"

yay -Ss <package-name>

For example, another case, If you only need to know the information of a certain package:

yay -Si <package-name>

If we want install a local package, just type:

yay -U ruta-del-paquete

It is also possible to only place the name of the package and it will search for all those related to the criteria and this will show us in a list the ones found and will ask us to select the one of our interest.

yay <package-name>

In case you want to know what updates we have available, just type:

yay -Pu

In case you only require sync packages from database:

yay -Sy

If they want perform a system update we must type:

yay -Syu

Update the system, including installed AUR packages, we just type:

yay -Syua

For install any package without commits (without user intervention, of course), use the "-noconfirm" option.

yay -S --noconfirm <package-name>

To eliminate unwanted dependencies, just type the following:

yay -Yc

If we want to clean the application cache, just type:

yay -Scc

In case you want to delete "only" a package or application:

yay -R <package-name>

To remove a package or application along with its dependencies:

yay -Rs <package-name>

To remove a package, its dependencies and configurations, we must type:

yay -Rnsc

If you want to know a little more about the use of yay, you can consult its manual by typing:

man yay