Installation

Aura is software specific to Arch Linux. It should also work on Arch-derivatives like Manjaro, but would not be useful on any other Linux distribution.

There are several aura packages available. Aura was originally written in Haskell, but a port to Rust was released in 2024 as the 4.x series.

From the AUR

The Tagged Release

The recommended package is simply named aura. It uses cargo to build a fresh binary on your machine, based on releases made to Rust's crates.io.

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/aura.git
cd aura
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U <the-package-file-that-makepkg-produces>

The git-based Build

If instead you'd like to directly track updates to Aura's master branch, install the git variant:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/aura-git.git
cd aura-git
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U <the-package-file-that-makepkg-produces>

The Prebuilt Binary

Finally, if you don't wish to build Aura yourself or want to avoid any trace of Rust tooling on your machine, there is a prebuilt binary of Aura for x86_64 machines:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/aura-bin.git
cd aura-bin
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U <the-package-file-that-makepkg-produces>

Building from Source

If you already have Rust tooling installed on your machine and/or wish to help develop Aura, you can also install it manually:

git clone https://github.com/fosskers/aura.git
cd aura/rust
cargo install --path aura-pm

This will build and install the binary to /home/YOU/.cargo/bin/.

Keep in mind that this variant of Aura won't be tracked in pacman's database, and so it will be easier to miss updates. It also does not install completions or other documentation files like manpages.

Post-installation

The first thing you should do is run check:

aura check

This will scan your system for irregularities and suggest fixes. Second, you should generate an Aura config file:

aura conf --gen > ~/.config/aura/config.toml

Consider setting the language field here, if you wish to use Aura in a language other than English. The available language codes are viewable via:

aura stats --lang

Aura will also automatically detect your locale via LANG, so you only need to set language if you want a custom combination of system language and Aura language.