The fact that the Arch User Repository(AUR) is not easily accessible from pacman may be frustrating to new users of Arch Linux and its derrivatives. Even worse is that many popular programs such as the Arduino IDE are in the AUR. In this Instructable, I will provide a tutorial on how to install programs from the AUR.

There are two methods of doing this, I will tell you how to use both.

Step 1: Prepare Your Computer to Use the AUR

This is the first step to installing software from the AUR. This is required no matter which method you choose.

First, open a terminal window. run this command:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel

You are now ready to install packages from the AUR.

Step 2: Method One Step One: Download Tarball

open your favorite web browser and go to aur.archlinux.org. This is the AUR home page. "Package Search" is self-explanitory. Enter keywords for the package you are trying to find. A list will appear. Click on the package you wish to install that appears in the list. Each package the has its own page. On the top right of the page for the package, it gives you the option to "Download tarball," so download the tarball. For this tutorial, I will use arduino as an example, and assume you are using the AMD64 architechture. the file "arduino.tar.gz" is now in your "Downloads" folder.

Step 3: Extract the Tarball, Build and Install the Package

open the terminal again. Run the commands:
cd ~/Downloads
tar -xvzf arduino.tar.gz

this creates a file named simply "arduino."
Now run these commands:

cd arduino
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U arduino-1:1.0.5-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

Note: if you are using a 32bit OS, "i686" is used instead of "x86-64"

If you are really installing Arduino, then in order for you to communicate with the board, you must join the "lock," "uucp," and "tty" groups.

Step 4: Method Two

If you are using Antergos, then you can simply install yaourt and use this to install a package. Having done this, run this command in the terminal:
yaourt arduino

A list will appear, where Arduino is no.2. At the bottom of the page it say to enter the number of the package you want to install, so enter "2."

On Manjaro, yaourt is installed by default.

Step 5: Conclusion

Just be careful of what you install, but the disclaimer on aur.archlinux.org already tells you that, but if you are sure that packages are safe, the AUR can be useful.