This is my collection of Arch Linux system configuration PKGBUILD files.
The purpose of this project is to simplify the process of setting up and maintaining multiple Arch Linux systems, as well as cleaning up the list of explicitly installed packages. With these meta packages I can install most everything needed for my uses and automate some basic setup tasks.
This software is licensed under the MIT-0 license.
Note
I would recommend that you use this project for inspiration or fork it as a template for your own custom setup. You probably do not want to install these packages as-is because they will be specific to my usage in places (e.g. US-English, US-pacific time zone).
The makefile includes some basic operations:
make clean- Remove build artifactsmake check- Perform some basic syntax/validity checksmake- Build the packages and create/update the repo
The packages are built with makepkg. This method includes some information about your system, and is a little more susceptible to dependency errors. You may want to consider building in a clean chroot if you want to serve the repo over the public internet or to other people.
The "repo" folder will contain everything you need to host the package repository. Serve this folder on your local network to make the repo available to all computers on the LAN.
I recommend that you sync the folder to a dedicated intranet server on your LAN. If the server is down when a client computer attempts to update the package repos for a pacman -Syu operation then it will report an error.
Enable the repo on systems by editing the /etc/pacman.conf file and adding the repo with the following configuration:
[private]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = http://serverhostname/repo
- Replace "private" with the
TARGET_REPOspecified in the makefile - Replace "serverhostname" with the real host name or IP address of the server hosting the repo folder.
You can now install the desired system configuration meta packages with pacman.
For example, on my Xfce workstation I will install the needed packages with the following command:
sudo pacman -S system-config-devel system-config-workstation system-config-xfce
Or on my GNOME laptop, I would install this instead:
sudo pacman -S system-config-gnome
It would be best to install these when first setting up the system (I do this during the arch-chroot installation step). However, they can be installed at any time after the system is set up.
You may need to clean up a couple .pacnew files, so pay attention to notices during installation.
After installing the system config meta packages you may want to set the install reason of the dependencies. This step isn't strictly necessary, however it makes the package tracking in pacman more accurate so that maintenance will be done correctly, as well as makes browsing the installed packages much nicer in the future.
If you are installing this on a brand new Arch Linux installation then the pacstrap command you ran will explicitly install three packages that the system config meta packages depend on. So you can set their install reason to "asdeps" with this command:
sudo pacman -D --asdeps base linux linux-firmware
If you are installing this on an already configured system then I recommend that you have pacman set all of the meta package dependencies install reason to "asdeps". This is to ensure that future changes to your system config meta packages will allow you to clean up unused packages on your computers.
For example, if you installed the system-config-xfce package then you can set all of it's dependencies to "asdeps" with the following command:
sudo pacman -D --asdeps $(pactree -u system-config-xfce)
Now if you change or remove a dependency in the system config then any leftover packages will be marked as orphans that can be uninstalled when performing regular system maintenance.
Special thanks to the Arch Linux enthusiasts who published articles and code explaining how to accomplish this. Here are some particularly useful links for anyone wanting to make something like this.