In the early days, I used Yaourt¹ like anybody else. It was very convenient, and for some reason I stopped using it. Today, no one should use it, but people use other helpers² very similar to it.

Most helpers, at least if they are wrappers for pacman³, encourages bad practices. I have used some helpers mainly for searching the AUR from the command line, but also downloading and updating. Nowadays, I manually download/clone the AUR repo, build and install using pacman. I only used cower⁴ for checking updates until I switched to perl-checkupdates-aur⁵, until it stopped working.

Finding a solution, my old AUR account didn't have the Notify of package updates option enabled. This option is enabled for new accounts, but my account is old. Now I get updates via email, and can git pull to update and rebuild the package.

If you want to avoid AUR helpers, here are my steps.

1. Create a folder where you can store your packages and enter it.
2. Clone the package using git.
3. Read the PKGBUILD (and other files) and build the package.
4. Install the package (or use -i with makepkg).
5. Create an AUR account and enable notifications.

You should get notifications via email if a package updates, and you can git pull to update. If you really need an AUR helper.. look into aurutils⁶.

To simplify your git cloning, add this to your .gitconfig.

[url "https://aur.archlinux.org/"]
	insteadOf = "aur:"
[url "ssh+git://aur.archlinux.org/"]
	pushInsteadOf = "aur:"

Clone the package using git clone aur:<pkg name>.

Footnotes