Install Arch packages with makepkg

I want to start quantifying how I spend my time at the computer, so I turned to to Rescuetime, which I have been using successfully on Ubuntu in the past. Unfortunately, the package in the AUR is about 6 months old and there have been several updates of Rescuetime since. Luckily, a few users had posted updated PKGBUILD files in the AUR comment section, which could be used to build the latest version of Rescuetime. After a few minutes of initial confusion, this turned out to be easy and well-documented in the Arch wiki:

• Download the unofficial Rescuetime package from Github.
  • git clone https://github.com/jamesan-unofficial-aur-pkgs/rescuetime
• That PKGBUILD is not the latest version, which instead is posted by another user on pastebin. Download the pastebin version and substitute it for the PKGBUILD file in the Rescuetime directory. For reference, I include the complete PKBUILD here.

# Maintainer: Limao Luo <luolimao+AUR@gmail.com>
# Contributor: kaptoxic dragos240
 
pkgname=rescuetime
pkgver=2.9.10.1255
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="Application time-tracking for Linux. Stable version"
arch=(i686 x86_64)
url=https://www.rescuetime.com
license=(GPL2)
depends=(qt4 xorg-xprop xprintidle)
conflicts=($pkgname-beta)
install=$pkgname.install
changelog=$pkgname.changelog
 
if [[ $CARCH == "x86_64" ]]
then
    _suffix=amd64
md5sums=('bd81f31fbb13a5b73ac5bf41bbf243f6')
else
    _suffix=i386
md5sums=('79ef7170b5e047712751fa769fd21465')
fi
 
source=($url/installers/rescuetime_current_$_suffix.deb)
 
package() {
    bsdtar -xf data.tar.gz
    install -Dm755 usr/bin/$pkgname "$pkgdir"/usr/bin/$pkgname
    install -Dm755 usr/share/$pkgname/curl-ca-bundle.crt "$pkgdir"/usr/share/$pkgname/curl-ca-bundle.crt
}

• If not there already, navigate to the same directory as the downloaded git files and use makepkg to build and install Rescuetime.
  • makepkg -s
    • Although -s is supposed to install dependencies, I had to get one from the AUR separately: aura -A xprintidle.
  • makepkg -ic
    • -i installs and -c cleans up files that are not needed anymore.

That’s it! Things are pretty convenient on Arch and its derivatives =)