Migration Guide

v4 is a complete overhaul for Aura. Care has been taken to maintain prior usage patterns, but there are some changes that the user should be aware of. If you're new to Aura, you can skip this entirely and move straight to Usage.

If you notice that something other than what is mentioned here used to work but no longer does, please report it.

sudo

You no longer need to run Aura with sudo for "administrative" tasks. So:

> aura -S firefox

"just works", and you'll be prompted for a password as necessary. This is true for all Aura commands.

Package Building

Build User and Build Directory

Since sudo is no longer necessary, Aura runs entirely as your personal user, and thus makepkg is also invoked internally entirely as you. There are no longer any internal user switching hacks just to build packages. This fixes a number of historical bugs.

Aura packages were previously built in /tmp/, but now they are built in ~/.cache/aura/builds/ by default. Aura also keeps its own cache, whereas previously all built package tarballs were moved to the pacman cache under /var/. Doing everything as the local user in the user's own section of the filesystem ensures that special permissions are never necessary.

An exception to the above is when aura is run as the root user, for example on remote servers or within Docker containers. In these cases, root is detected and packages are built under /tmp/ as the nobody user. Since nobody has no $HOME and no permissions to write anywhere else, this helps ensure that package building cannot harm your wider system.

Makepkg output suppression with -x

makepkg output is now shown by default and cannot be hidden. -x is still provided to prevent old scripts from breaking, but it has no effect.

PKGBUILD diff viewing with -k

You are now prompted after the diff is printed so that you actually have a chance to read what has changed.

PKGBUILD Analysis

The -P command has been removed entirely. Further, automatic analysis that occurred before building is now done through shellcheck.

Configuration

Previously Aura was configured in /etc/aura.conf using a custom format. Now configuration files exist per-user in ~/.config/aura/config.toml and use the TOML format. A fresh configuration file can be generated via:

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

Locale

Aura will auto-detect your system's language from your $LANG variable, but it's still possible to override this with the language field. Previously the language code was just the language portion (e.g. hi), but now it requires the country portion as well (e.g. hi-IN, Hindi from India). Acceptable values can been found in the output of:

aura stats --lang