IMPALA

Intelligent Manager for Packages, AUR, and Local Archives - A user-friendly AUR helper written in Python
(or: yet another (almost) Instant AUR helper for Managing Packages And helping users navigate Linux cli tools. Amen.)

Features

• User friendly UX designed with beginners in mind, without sacrificing the comfort of advanced users:
  • Plain English commands, not flags. install instead of -S, remove instead of -Rs
  • Package lists are output as concise tables including all package information.
  • Pretty text formatting using Rich, pretty confirmation prompts using Questionary.
• Narrow search with keywords (impala install zen browser searches for zen and then filters out packages without browser)
• Search repositories from pacman.conf along with the AUR.
• Automatically install dependencies required to build packages

System requirements

Operating system

Arch Linux, or any Arch Linux based distribution

Installed packages

IMPALA requires the following packages to be installed:

• git
• base-devel
• python version 3.8 or higher
• pip (can be uninstalled after IMPALA is built)

Installation

From the AUR (recommended)

COMING SOON: IMPALA has not yet been submitted to the AUR/is awaiting approval. This readme will be updated once installing from the AUR is viable.

From PyPI

You can install IMPALA from PyPI with the following command:

pip install impala-aur-helper

View IMPALA on PyPI at: https://pypi.org/project/impala-aur-helper/1.0b1/

From source

IMPALA can be installed from source in two ways:

Using makepkg (recommended)

IMPALA can be installed by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/tildes1lly/IMPALA.git
cd IMPALA
makepkg -si

If you'd like to chain them all together, you can do so as well:

git clone https://github.com/tildes1lly/IMPALA.git && cd IMPALA && makepkg -si

Using pip

IMPALA can be installed with pip using the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/tildes1lly/IMPALA.git
cd IMPALA
pip install .

If you'd like to chain them all together, you can do so as well:

git clone https://github.com/tildes1lly/IMPALA.git && cd IMPALA && pip install .

Usage

Commands

Install

impala install <keywords>
Searches the AUR and repositories for matching packages and asks the user which package(s) to install.
Example: impala install firefox

Remove

impala remove <keywords>
Searches for installed packages matching keywords and asks the user which package(s) to uninstall
Example: impala remove firefox

Upgrade/Update

impala upgrade or impala update
Upgrades all packages that are out of date.
Example: impala upgrade

Impala vs. yay and paru

User Interface

Package installation

yay:

paru:

IMPALA:

System upgrades

yay:

paru:

IMPALA:

Note

NOTE: IMPALA focuses on user experience as opposed to yay and paru. yay and paru may be better for advanced users.

Bad PKGBUILD: Waterfox

NOTE: Waterfox has a bad PKGBUILD as of this being written. That is why Waterfox was chosen for a comparison. The AUR helpers are all expected to fail here, the comparison is how long they'll take before erroring out of a bad PKGBUILD

https://github.com/tildes1lly/IMPALA/raw/main/README_media/comparison.mp4

NOTE: This video contains speed changes, as if it didn't it would be 13 minutes long.
If you don't want to watch the video: IMPALA & paru perform similarly (paru: 15s, IMPALA: 25s) while yay falls behind taking 11 minutes before failing.

Note

These comparisons are all made in good faith. This project was heavily inspired by yay and paru and much love goes towards their developers. yay and paru objectively have more features than IMPALA; if you are a power user, they are probably better for your needs.

Contributing

If you want to contribute to IMPALA, create a fork fixing an issue or adding a feature. Then, open a pull request.
For monetary contributions, see Supporting IMPALA.

License

IMPALA is licensed under GNU GPL 3.0.

Supporting IMPALA