arch-manwarn

arch-manwarn is a fast, configurable and lightweight Rust-Based pacman hook that detects Arch Linux News requiring manual intervention, and blocks upgrades only when relevant to your system.

It’s designed to stay quiet unless action is actually needed, helping you avoid breakage without adding unnecessary noise.

What does it do?

Whenever pacman performs an upgrade or install, arch-manwarn runs as a pacman hook.

It checks the Arch Linux News feed for recent posts that match your configured keywords (e.g. "manual intervention") and blocks the transaction if a match is found — helping you avoid breaking changes.

Once installed, test it with:

arch-manwarn

This should return a short confirmation message.

Modes of Operation

arch-manwarn supports four modes:

• arch-manwarn - Prints quick confirmation message (used for sanity checks).

• arch-manwarn check - Used internally by the pacman hook to detect new warnings.

• arch-manwarn status - Displays a list of cached matching warnings with timestamps.

• arch-manwarn read - Manually mark all unread warnings as read (usually not needed unless configuration is adjusted).

  On first run, it assumes you have already read all previous warnings.

arch-manwarn flags news containing "manual intervention" (case-insensitive) as requiring action. You can customize keywords in /etc/arch-manwarn/config.toml

keywords = ["manual intervention", "breaking change"]

The pacman hook only activates on upgrades or installs therefore if for any reason arch-manwarn causes issues with your system or pacman transactions you can always remove it:

sudo pacman -Rns arch-manwarn

Why arch-manwarn?

I created this tool to avoid missing important manual interventions in the Arch news.

But unlike tools that intrusively interrupt you for every news post, arch-manwarn blocks transactions only for the ones matching your defined criteria.

It's lean, fast, and written in Rust — prioritizing simplicity, efficiency, and precision.

Instead of intrusively blocking every pacman transaction for every news, arch-manwarn filters only those which require manual intervention.

If you want to be notified of every Arch news post, you can either configure arch-manwarn to match all entries or check out informant, an alternative designed for that behavior.

Installation

AUR (Recommended)

Install from the AUR Package:

paru -S arch-manwarn

or

yay -S arch-manwarn

Configuration

arch-manwarn uses a TOML configuration file. The default path is /etc/arch-manwarn/config.toml

You can override this path using the ARCH_MANWARN_CONFIG environment variable:

export ARCH_MANWARN_CONFIG=/path/to/your/config.toml

Example config.toml with default options

# Keywords that trigger warnings (case-insensitive)
keywords = ["manual intervention",]

# If true, match all news posts regardless of keywords
match_all_entries = false

# Ignore news entries containing any of these keywords
ignored_keywords = []

# Whether keyword query is case sensitive (Applies to both ignore and regular keywords)
case_sensitive = false

# Include the summary in keyword matching
include_summary_in_query=true

# Both of these conditions must be met to prune a cached news entry:
# 1. It has not been seen in the RSS feed for `prune_missing_days`, AND
# 2. It is older than `prune_age_days`.
# This avoids removing entries that may temporarily disappear from the feed.
prune_missing_days = 30
prune_age_days = 60


# RSS feed URLs to check
# Adding feeds with high latency can massively impact performance
rss_feed_urls = [
    "https://archlinux.org/feeds/news/",
]

# Display summaries for matching news posts
show_summary = false

# Automatically mark entries as read after showing them
mark_as_read_automatically = true

# Warn only (don’t block pacman) - essentially dry-run
warn_only = false

# Where to store the cache
cache_path = "/var/cache/arch-manwarn.json"

Development

A mirror of the AUR PKGBUILD can be found here

Due to permission issues when running the program manually instead of via the arch-manwarn.hook, you may need to change the cache path from /var/cache. You can do this like so:

ARCH_NEWS_CACHE_PATH=./arch-manwarn-cache.json ARCH_MANWARN_CONFIG=./arch-manwarn-config.toml cargo run

To install locally

1. Build the release binary: cargo build --release

2. Copy binary to /usr/bin/arch-manwarn

   sudo install -Dm755 target/release/arch-manwarn /usr/bin/arch-manwarn
   

3. Copy hooks/arch-manwarn.hook to /etc/pacman.d/hooks/

   sudo install -Dm644 hooks/arch-manwarn.hook /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/arch-manwarn.hook
   

Contribute & Support

Contributions, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome!

Star the repo ⭐ if you find it useful!