Manjaro pamac¶

ID: pamac
Links: Repository · Wikipedia
Upstream stars: ⭐ 10
Last commit: 2025-12-01
Version requirement: >= 11
Platforms: 🐧 Linux
Operations: installed · outdated · orphans · search · install · upgrade · upgrade_all · remove · cleanup
purl types: pkg:alpm/ · pkg:pamac/
CLI name: pamac
Issues and PRs: 📦 manager: pacman-based
Source: pamac.toml

pamac is Manjaro’s package manager (https://github.com/manjaro/pamac-cli).

The project is split across three repositories: the pamac binary mpm drives ships from manjaro/pamac-cli, the GTK front-end from manjaro/pamac and the libalpm backend from manjaro/libpamac. The GitLab home this manager was queued under is archived and redirects to GitHub.

Escalation is polkit’s, so no operation is marked sudo: run as a normal user pamac spawns pkttyagent and authenticates the transaction over D-Bus against the org.manjaro.pamac.commit policy. Manjaro’s own wiki is explicit that sudo pamac is wrong (“Do not use sudo with pamac”), and wrapping it would stack escalation on top of the broker. --no-confirm suppresses pamac’s own “Apply transaction ?” prompt but never the polkit check, so an unattended run depends on the host’s polkit policy, exactly as it does for pkcon.

No color to suppress and no color flag to pass: src/cli.vala and src/transaction-cli.vala contain no ANSI escape, no isatty branch and no color option at all. Only search is terminal-width sensitive, and its get_term_width() falls back to 80 columns when the TIOCGWINSZ ioctl fails, which is what happens under the pipe mpm reads through.

No sync: pamac ships no read-only metadata refresh. Its whole subcommand set is search, info, list, clone, build, install, reinstall, remove, checkupdates, upgrade/update and clean. Refreshing happens either as a side effect of upgrade --force-refresh, which is a full system upgrade, or into throwaway temporary databases inside checkupdates. Declaring one would mean faking it with a mutating command.

Everything here is scoped to the official repositories: --no-aur is passed explicitly wherever pamac accepts it, rather than inheriting the host’s /etc/pamac.conf, whose EnableAUR is on by default on Manjaro. That keeps results identical on every host and keeps outdated off the AUR RPC. The blind spot is the same one pacman documents: list --installed still lists foreign packages (an AUR package simply has an empty repository column), so an AUR package appears as installed yet never as outdated. Reach the AUR through the helpers mpm wraps for it (yay, paru, pikaur, trizen, pacaur).

What `mpm` adds to `pamac`¶

Through mpm, pamac gains --exact and --extended search, to narrow to exact names or match descriptions.

Bigger still, mpm reaches across every manager at once: mpm installed and mpm outdated cover pamac alongside aura, dkp-pacman, pacaur, pacman, paru, pikaur, shelly, trizen, yay and any other manager you run in one table, mpm upgrade --all updates them together, and mpm sbom exports the whole machine as one bill of materials.

Every mpm command also gains --dry-run and --plan previews, cross-scheme version comparison and purl identifiers. See manager augmentations for how each one is built.

Your `pamac` commands, in `mpm`¶

You already know pamac: each operation maps one-to-one onto mpm, in an interface shared by every manager.

To…	With `pamac`	With `mpm`
List what’s installed	`pamac list --installed`	`mpm --pamac installed`
List outdated packages	`pamac checkupdates --quiet --no-aur`	`mpm --pamac outdated`
Search for a package	`pamac search --no-aur <query>`	`mpm --pamac search <query>`
Install a package	`pamac install --no-confirm <package_id>`	`mpm install pkg:pamac/<package_id>`
Upgrade one package	`pamac install --no-confirm --no-upgrade <package_id>`	`mpm --pamac upgrade <package_id>`
Upgrade everything	`pamac upgrade --no-confirm --no-aur`	`mpm --pamac upgrade --all`
Remove a package	`pamac remove --no-confirm <package_id>`	`mpm remove pkg:pamac/<package_id>`
List orphaned dependencies	`pamac list --orphans`	`mpm --pamac orphans`
Clear caches	`pamac clean --no-confirm`	`mpm --pamac cleanup --cache`

Prefix any command above with --dry-run to simulate the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Operations¶

Operation	Supported	Notes
`installed`	✅
`outdated`	✅
`orphans`	✅
`search`	✅	Exact and extended search backfilled by `mpm`.
`install`	✅	A package already installed as a dependency is marked explicit by `mpm`.
`upgrade`	✅
`upgrade_all`	✅
`remove`	✅
`sync`
`cleanup`	✅	The `--orphans` flag runs the system-wide orphan sweep.
`doctor`

Configuration¶

Ignore pamac on the mpm CLI by passing the --no-pamac option.
Ignore it for every run in your configuration:
```
[mpm]
pamac = false
```
Raise the timeout of all pamac calls:
```
[mpm.overrides.pamac]
timeout = 900
```

Run mpm config-template pamac to print all overridable settings for your configuration file:

[mpm.overrides.pamac]
cli_names = [
    "pamac",
]
cli_search_path = []
dry_run = false
ignore_auto_updates = true
plan = false
post_args = []
pre_args = []
pre_cmds = []
requirement = ">=11.0.0"
stop_on_error = false
unmaintained = false
version_cli_options = [
    "--version",
]
version_regexes = [
    "^\\S+\\s+(?P<version>\\d+\\.\\d+\\.\\d+)",
]

Recipes¶

A few jobs you would otherwise script around pamac, one mpm command each:

Snapshot and clone a machine: mpm --pamac dump pamac.toml, then mpm restore pamac.toml on the next one.
Export a compliance SBOM: mpm --pamac sbom (CycloneDX by default, --spdx for SPDX).

Privilege escalation¶

mpm runs this manager as the current user and never prepends sudo by default. Flip the policy for its privileged operations with --sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

Its privileged operation is install.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Concurrency¶

mpm never runs pamac at the same time as aura, pacaur, pacman, paru, pikaur, trizen or yay: they all reach the pacman database (/var/lib/pacman/db.lck), and two of them mutating at once fail to init their transaction. Each mutating operation waits for the previous one, even with a higher --jobs, while managers outside this group keep running in parallel.

Only mutations are held back. The read-only queries (installed, outdated, search) take no backend lock and stay fully concurrent.

Cooldown¶

State of Manjaro pamac’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None

A cooldown only pays off where a compromised release can be withdrawn while the clock runs, and can only be emulated where the registry dates its releases. From the retraction table:

Registry: Distro binary archives (pkg:deb, pkg:rpm, pkg:alpm, pkg:apk)
Retraction: Index revert: removal is an archive operation and the mirror is rebuilt without the package. Debian, for one, requires filing an RM: bug against ftp.debian.org (developers-reference)
Publish date: ❌ the version string is the distro maintainer’s build, carrying no upstream publication date

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --cooldown best-effort opts back in.

Reference traces¶

A collection of raw native outputs captured from the manager’s own CLI and recorded in the bundled definition. If you know Manjaro pamac well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ pamac list --installed
plymouth 26.134.222-1  extra  1.2 MB
ventoy   1.1.12-1      extra  16.8 MB

$ pamac checkupdates --quiet --no-aur
plymouth  26.134.222-1 -> 26.134.222-2
ventoy  1.1.12-1 -> 1.1.14-1

Version check¶

The version is probed by running:

$ pamac --version
pamac-cli 11.7.4  -  libpamac 11.7.4

and extracted with:

r"^\S+\s+(?P<version>\d+\.\d+\.\d+)"

Upstream project¶

Metrics	`manjaro/pamac-cli`
Activity
Popularity
Metadata

Changelog¶

8.0.0 (2026-09-20)
- Mark a package already installed as a dependency as explicitly installed when mpm install or mpm restore names it, so mpm cleanup --orphans keeps it.
- Declare support for the Linux compatibility layers, WSL included, in place of the Linux distributions alone, so the readme’s operation matrix reports their platforms.
- Add Manjaro’s pamac package manager with installed, outdated, orphans, search, install, upgrade, remove and cleanup support, scoped to the official repositories, escalation left to polkit.
- Stop running the AUR helpers concurrently with pacman and with each other, all of them driving the same pacman database.