alpm-hooks(5)

Table of Contents
NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
TRIGGERS
ACTIONS
OVERRIDING HOOKS
EXAMPLES
CAVEATS
Bugs
Authors

NAME
alpm-hooks - alpm hook file format

SYNOPSIS

[Trigger] (Required, Repeatable)

[Action] (Required)
Description = ... (Optional)
When = PreTransaction|PostTransaction (Required)
Exec = <Command> (Required)
Depends = <PkgName> (Optional)
AbortOnFail (Optional, PreTransaction only)
NeedsTargets (Optional)

DESCRIPTION
libalpm provides the ability to specify hooks to run before or after transactions based on the
packages and/or files being modified. Hooks consist of a single [Action] section describing the
action to be run and one or more [Trigger] section describing which transactions it should be
run for.
Hooks are read from files located in the system hook directory
/usr/share/libalpm/hooks, and additional custom directories specified in
pacman.conf(5) (the default is /etc/pacman.d/hooks). The file names are required to have
the suffix ".hook". Hooks are run in alphabetical order of their file name, where the ordering
ignores the suffix.

TRIGGERS
Hooks must contain at least one [Trigger] section that determines which transactions will
cause the hook to run. If multiple trigger sections are defined the hook will run if the
transaction matches any of the triggers.
Operation = Install|Upgrade|Remove
Select the type of operation to match targets against. May be specified multiple times.
Installations are considered an upgrade if the package or file is already present on the
system regardless of whether the new package version is actually greater than the
currently installed version. For Path triggers, this is true even if the file changes
ownership from one package to another. Required.
Type = Path|Package
Select whether targets are matched against transaction packages or files. See CAVEATS
for special notes regarding Path triggers. File is a deprecated alias for Path and will be
removed in a future release. Required.
Target = <path|package>
The path or package name to match against the active transaction. Paths refer to the files
in the package archive; the installation root should not be included in the path. Shell-
style glob patterns are allowed. It is possible to invert matches by prepending a target
with an exclamation mark. May be specified multiple times. Required.

ACTIONS
Description = …
An optional description that describes the action being taken by the hook for use in
front-end output.
Exec = <command>
Command to run. Command arguments are split on whitespace. Values containing
whitespace should be enclosed in quotes. Required.
When = PreTransaction|PostTransaction
When to run the hook. Required.
Depends = <package>
Packages that must be installed for the hook to run. May be specified multiple times.
AbortOnFail
Causes the transaction to be aborted if the hook exits non-zero. Only applies to
PreTransaction hooks.
NeedsTargets
Causes the list of matched trigger targets to be passed to the running hook on stdin.
OVERRIDING HOOKS
Hooks may be overridden by placing a file with the same name in a higher priority hook
directory. Hooks may be disabled by overriding them with a symlink to /dev/null.

EXAMPLES
# Force disks to sync to reduce the risk of data corruption

[Trigger]
Operation = Install
Operation = Upgrade
Operation = Remove
Type = Package
Target = *

[Action]
Depends = coreutils
When = PostTransaction
Exec = /usr/bin/sync

CAVEATS
There are situations when path triggers may act in unexpected ways. Hooks are triggered
using the file list of the installed, upgraded, or removed package. When installing or
upgrading a file that is extracted with a .pacnew extension, the original file name is used in
triggering the hook. When removing a package, all files owned by that package can trigger a
hook whether or not they were actually present on the file system before package removal.
PostTransaction hooks will not run if the transaction fails to complete for any reason.
See the pacman website at https://archlinux.org/pacman/ for current information on pacman
and its related tools.

Bugs
Bugs? You must be kidding; there are no bugs in this software. But if we happen to be wrong,
submit a bug report with as much detail as possible at the Arch Linux Bug Tracker in the
Pacman section.

Authors
Current maintainers:
Allan McRae <[email protected]>
 Andrew Gregory <[email protected]>
Eli Schwartz <[email protected]>
Morgan Adamiec <[email protected]>
Past major contributors:
Judd Vinet <[email protected]>
Aurelien Foret <[email protected]>
Aaron Griffin <[email protected]>
Dan McGee <[email protected]>
Xavier Chantry <[email protected]>
Nagy Gabor <[email protected]>
Dave Reisner <[email protected]>

For additional contributors, use git shortlog -s on the pacman.git repository.

Last updated 2021-09-04 12:42:20 EEST