Jguer/yay · error

: please set AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD environment…

Error message

%s: please set AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD environment variables for voting

What it means

handlePackageVote detects the sentinel vote.ErrNoCredentials from the AUR vote client and replaces it with this error telling the user to export AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD. The AUR voting RPC requires authenticated credentials, and without them voting/unvoting cannot proceed. The original error text is embedded at the start of the message.

Solutions

1. Export AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD before running yay: `export AUR_USERNAME=... AUR_PASSWORD=...`
2. Preserve the vars through sudo with `sudo -E yay ...` or sudo env_keep configuration
3. Verify with `echo $AUR_USERNAME $AUR_PASSWORD` in the same shell that runs yay
4. If voting is unwanted, disable the vote feature in yay config so the client is never invoked

Example fix

// before
$ yay -S linux
linux: please set AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD environment variables for voting
// after
$ export AUR_USERNAME=myuser AUR_PASSWORD='mypass'
$ yay -S linux

if os.Getenv("AUR_USERNAME") == "" || os.Getenv("AUR_PASSWORD") == "" {
	return errors.New("AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD must be set before voting")
}

func hasVoteCredentials() bool {
	u, p := os.LookupEnv("AUR_USERNAME"), os.LookupEnv("AUR_PASSWORD")
	return u != "" && p != ""
}

err := yayVote(pkg)
if err != nil {
	if strings.Contains(err.Error(), "AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD") {
		return fmt.Errorf("voting skipped for %s: set AUR_USERNAME/AUR_PASSWORD", pkg)
	}
	return err
}

When it happens

Trigger: Running `yay -S <pkg>` with vote enabled, or explicit vote/unvote operations, when voteClient.Vote/Unvote returns vote.ErrNoCredentials because AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD are unset in the environment.

Common situations: Users running yay from cron/systemd where the interactive shell environment (often holding the vars) is absent; fresh installs where voting env vars were never exported; running yay via sudo which strips environment variables.

Related errors

• failed to parse
• error resetting
• could not find all required packages
• failed to retrieve aur Cache
• invalid status code

AI-assisted analysis of Jguer/yay@328f4b4939 (2026-09-07). Data as JSON: /api/errors/d9c301c9131c30d0. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at vote.go:50

		return err
	}

	if len(infos) == 0 {
		logger.Println(gotext.Get(" there is nothing to do"))
		return nil
	}

	for i := range infos {
		var err error
		if upvote {
			err = voteClient.Vote(ctx, infos[i].PackageBase)
		} else {
			err = voteClient.Unvote(ctx, infos[i].PackageBase)
		}

		if err != nil {
			if errors.Is(err, vote.ErrNoCredentials) {
				return errors.New(
					gotext.Get("%s: please set AUR_USERNAME and AUR_PASSWORD environment variables for voting",
						err.Error()))
			}

			return &ErrAURVote{inner: err, pkgName: infos[i].Name}
		}
	}

	return nil
}

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