In this post I will explain how I did to create and share a PKGBUILD script using the AUR (Arch User Repostitory). This isn’t a complete or a beginner friendly guide, but it should help some people with basic Arch Linux knowledge to share their PKGBUILD scritps.

The manual page for PKGBUILD and the Arch wiki are a good starting point. I encourage you to read the following articles and maybe you do not need my post:

Step 1: create an AUR user account

If you’re going to share your PKGBUILD (not binary files) thru the AUR, you need to have an account and upload your SSH public key. To create the account just follow the register steps here.

Step 2: create a repostitory

This step could be confusing as you don’t have an option in the AUR to create a Git repostitory like you may have in other registries.

The way to do this is by cloning an empty repository from the AUR with the name of your package:

git clone ssh://aur@aur.archlinux.org/PKG_NAME.git

A good practice is to create the .gitignore file that ignores everything:

echo "*" > .gitignore

In this way you have to explicitly add files to your repository by using the -f flag.

git add -f <file>

Step 3: Write your PKGBUILD

This is a shell script that contains the information required to build the package. Packages in Arch Linux are built using the makepkg utility. When makepkg is run, it searches for a PKGBUILD file in the current directory and follows the instructions defined in it to either compile or acquire the files to build a package archive called (PKG_NAME.pkg.tar.zst). The resulting package contains binary files and installation instructions, readily installable with pacman -U PKG_NAME.pkg.tar.zst.

In this post I don’t cover how to write a PKGBUILD but you can find more information in the man pages or in the previous link that posted before. You can also use /usr/share/pacman/PKGBUILD.proto as a starting point. Be aware though that this is a full PKGBUILD containing tons of things that you may not actually need.

Note: You will notice that many other PKGBUILDs, in the package() function, use the install command to copy things into the file system. This is because it can copy files and set permissions in one go.

To update the package checksums in the PKGBUILD file, run updpkgsums, which belongs to the pacman-contrib package.

Step 4: build the package

In the directory containing the PKGBUILD you can run the following command to build the package:

makepkg -s

This will download the sources and create a .tar.zst file and a directory structure. This is where the .gitignore file comes into play, avoiding pushing junk to the repository. If you want to test or install the package, you can execute:

sudo pacman -U PKG_NAME.pkg.tar.zst

Step 5: Create the .SRCINFO file

The .SRCINFO file contains package metadata in a simple, unambiguous format, so that tools such as the AUR’s Web back-end or AUR helpers may retrieve a package’s metadata without parsing the PKGBUILD directly.

To create this file, in the working directory you need to execute:

makepkg --printsrcinfo > .SRCINFO

Step 6: Publish to the AUR 

git add -f .SRCINFO PKGBUILD
git commit .SRCINFO PKGBUILD -m "Some cool commit message"
git push origin master

Note: every time you modify the PKGBUILD, you need to update the checksums and the .SRCINFO file.



Did you find any errors? Please send me a pull request. The code of this article is available on
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