Pacstall – A useful AUR substitute for Ubuntu based distributions

By / November 16, 2022
Pacstall An AUR Replacement For Ubuntu

Arch User Repository or, simply, the AUR is one of the many reasons why people choose Arch Linux or its derivative distributions such as Manjaro or EndeavourOS. If you use an AUR helper on any Arch-based distribution, you do not ever have to install anything manually from GitHub ever again. And although Debian and Ubuntu use the apt package manager, which is one of the oldest package managers, a feature like AUR is still absent in Debian and Ubuntu.

Pacstall attempts to fill this gap for Debian and Ubuntu-based systems by acting as a third-party AUR. In this article, we will take a look at the installation procedure of this tool on any Ubuntu-based distribution, and we will also see how to install, remove and search packages with this tool.

Features of Pacstall

  • It supports installing AppImage, binaries, building applications from sources as well as installing deb packages.
  • Using Axel, you can accelerate the package download speeds.
  • You also have the option to install an application from different repositories.
  • You don’t even have to wait for the developer to push a new release in order to get a new update of this package, as this tool builds one from the git pushes.
  • Bash, Zsh, and Fish shell users do not have to type in the full commands every time as this supports shell completion.

Installing Pacstall

The installation process is really simple, just open a terminal window and type the following commands :

sudo bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://git.io/JsADh || wget -q https://git.io/JsADh -O -)"
Installing Pacstall On Ubuntu Linux
Installing Pacstall On Ubuntu Linux

And that is it, This ‘AUR helper’ is now installed, and we can start using it on our Machine.

Basic Commands

Let’s search for a package named ‘vim’, to do this, you can type the following commands :

pacstall -S vim
Searching For VIm Using Pacstall
Searching For VIm Using Pacstall

Now, to install a package, use the following command :

pacstall -I vim
Installing Vim Using Pacstall
Installing Vim using this script

To add a custom repository, you can run the following commands :

pacstall -A REPOSITORY_NAME

In order to update the Pacstall scripts, you can run the following command :

pacstall -U
Checking For Pacstall Updates
Check For Updates using -U option

To update all the packages, you can run:

pacstall -Up

In order to list more command options supported by this package, you can open its help menu:

pacstall -h
Use The Help Command To Know More Usage Options
Use The Help Command To Know More Usage Options

Summary

It is really cool to see that independent developers are filling the gap which we all felt whenever we used any Debian/Ubuntu-based distribution. Let’s hope that this package is regularly maintained and supported by the community. If you have a habit of always running apt install and apt update, then perhaps you can make an alias for this command in your Bashrc so that you do not have to remember new commands for installing a package.

References