aur: Python AUR interface

aur is a Python library that makes it easy to access and parse data from the Arch User Repository API.

Core functions

The AUR API has four query types. For each of these query types, aur exposes a function that calls the API with this query type.

aur.info(package_name_or_id)

Return the Package with the exact name package_name_or_id.

>>> info('linux-bfs')
<Package: linux-bfs>

aur.msearch(maintaining_user)

Return Package objects where the maintainer is maintaining_user.

>>> msearch('cdown')
[<Package: mpdmenu>, <Package: tzupdate>, <Package: yturl>]

aur.multiinfo(package_names_or_ids)

Return Package objects matching the exact names or ids specified in the iterable package_names_or_ids.

Packages are returned in the form {package_name: package} for easy access.

>>> multiinfo(['yturl', 'tzupdate'])
{'tzupdate': <Package: tzupdate>, 'yturl': <Package: yturl>}

aur.search(package_name_substring)

Return Package objects where package_name_substring is a substring.

>>> search('poco')
[<Package: poco>, <Package: flopoco>, <Package: libpoco-basic>]

The Package class

Most functions in this library return Package objects in some form. They essentially act as storage objects for all metadata related to a package.

>>> yturl = info('yturl')
>>> yturl.description
'YouTube videos on the command line'
>>> yturl.last_modified
datetime.datetime(2015, 9, 8, 22, 26, 24)
>>> yturl.out_of_date
False

class aur.Package

All package information retrieved from the API is stored in a Package, which is a namedtuple() with some extensions.

All information about the package is available as attributes with the same name as those returned by the API for each package, except that each one is snake case instead of Pascal case.

Here are all of the attributes available:

category_id

description

first_submitted

id

last_modified

license

maintainer

name

num_votes

out_of_date

package_base

package_base_id

url

url_path

version

Exceptions

aur uses requests internally, so general HTTP(S) exceptions will come from there.

There are also a number of more targeted exceptions defined in aur itself:

exception aur.AURError

The base class that all AUR exceptions inherit from.

exception aur.APIError

Raised when we get a generic API error that we don’t have a more specific exception for.

exception aur.QueryTooShortError

Raised when the query entered was too short. Typically, most search() queries must be at least 3 characters long.

exception aur.NoSuchPackageError

Raised when we explicitly requested a particular package, but we don’t have any reference to it in the returned data, which means that the requested package doesn’t exist.