Yay 12.6, the latest version of the popular AUR helper for Arch Linux, has been released about six months after the previous 12.5.7 update from mid-December 2025.
One main change is that repository search results are now sorted according to the repository order defined in pacman.conf, making Yay’s output better aligned with Pacman’s configured repository priority.
Search ranking has also been adjusted, with yay 12.6 incorporating AUR popularity into its search metric, switching to the Jaro-Winkler distance, and reweighting package search scores. The result is providing more relevant package matches when users look up software across repositories and the AUR.
The release also updates Yay’s AUR metadata provider and fixes behavior around missing packages. In particular, yay -Si now prints an error message when a requested package is not found, and yay correctly returns exit status 1 when no packages are found.
Another notable fix concerns package builds with incompatible architectures in makepkg 7.1 and newer; the new version addresses this compatibility issue. Plus, dependency errors now include their source, giving users more context when a package resolution issue occurs.
On top of that, yay now automatically regenerates an empty completion cache and fixes a race condition where the completion cache goroutine could conflict with ALPM handle cleanup.
However, not everything planned for this cycle made it into the final release. The maintainer notes the release “almost qualified for a major,” but the new configuration system was left out because it needed more work. In light of this, users who recently used yay-git are advised to check or recreate their config.json file, as they may have lost their configuration.
For additional details, see the changelog. Yay 12.6 is now available as an update in the AUR for Arch users.
