In the world of AUR helpers, Paru is a new name which is becoming extremely popular. If you have been around the community and have been hearing about this for sometime now without much idea about what the program actually does, keep reading along as in this module, we are going to discuss just that.
Introduction to Paru
The Arch User Repository (AUR) is one of the driving forces behind Arch’s popularity. However, pacman cannot access these repositories like it accesses the official repositories as packages in the AUR need to built using PKGBUILD files.
This is where an AUR helper comes in. It helps us automate the entire process and build packages directly from the Arch User Repository. AUR helpers can also search for packages from AUR and also resolve build dependencies.
Why Paru?
Paru is an AUR helper developed by Morganamilo, who was also one of the lead developers of yay, which is probably the most popular AUR helper. Unlike yay, which is written in Go, paru is written in Rust.
In a recent Reddit post, Morganamilo announced that he would no longer contribute to yay and rather would focus on paru. Even Jguer who is the other developer for yay commented that paru is a feature-rich AUR Helper and though he continues to work with yay, it still had very extensive and handy capabilities.
How to install Paru in Arch?
To install paru, first we need to install some dependencies with :
$ sudo pacman -S base-devel --needed
Next up we need to install paru, we need to clone the github repository with :
$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
Now, we need to build the package using the PKGBUILD file :
$ cd paru
$ makepkg -si
Useful Paru Commands
Here are some of the commands which might be instrumental to an user :
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| paru <target> | Interactively search and install <target> |
| paru | Alias for paru -Syu |
| paru -S <target> | Install a specific package |
| paru -Sua | Upgrade AUR packages |
| paru -Qua | Print available AUR updates. |
| paru -Gc <target> | Print the AUR comments of <target> |
| paru -Ui | Build and install a PKGBUILD in the current directory |
Reasons you should start using Paru
Paru is the next upcoming AUR helper and ever since the main developer for yay shifted to paru as a full-time project, it has gained a lot of popularity.
Paru is also very feature rich. Since it is based off on yay, it encompasses all of it’s features. However, being written in Rust, it is very fast and with the ever growing features (especially now that yay will be less frequently updated than paru ), more and more Arch users are inclining towards using paru as the default AUR helper.
Conclusion
Being comparatively newer in the AUR helper community, paru still has a long way to go before it completely replaces yay. However, with the actively growing community around it and it’s feature rich nature, more users are starting to use it as their default and it holds a very promising future.