Packaging Tesseras for Arch Linux

2026-02-16

Tesseras now ships a PKGBUILD for Arch Linux. This post walks through building and installing the package from source.

Prerequisites

You need a working Rust toolchain and the base-devel group:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel sqlite
rustup toolchain install stable

Building

Clone the repository and run the just arch recipe:

git clone https://git.sr.ht/~ijanc/tesseras
cd tesseras
just arch

This runs makepkg -sf inside packaging/archlinux/, which:

prepare — fetches Cargo dependencies with cargo fetch --locked
build — compiles tesd and tes (the CLI) in release mode
package — installs binaries, systemd service, sysusers/tmpfiles configs, shell completions (bash, zsh, fish), and a default config file

The result is a .pkg.tar.zst file in packaging/archlinux/.

Installing

sudo pacman -U packaging/archlinux/tesseras-*.pkg.tar.zst

Post-install setup

The package creates a tesseras system user and group automatically via systemd-sysusers. To use the CLI without sudo, add yourself to the group:

sudo usermod -aG tesseras $USER

Log out and back in, then start the daemon:

sudo systemctl enable --now tesd

What the package includes

Path	Description
`/usr/bin/tesd`	Full node daemon
`/usr/bin/tes`	CLI client
`/etc/tesseras/config.toml`	Default configuration (marked as backup)
`/usr/lib/systemd/system/tesd.service`	Systemd unit with security hardening
`/usr/lib/sysusers.d/tesseras.conf`	System user definition
`/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/tesseras.conf`	Data directory `/var/lib/tesseras`
Shell completions	bash, zsh, and fish

PKGBUILD details

The PKGBUILD builds directly from the local git checkout rather than downloading a source tarball. The TESSERAS_ROOT environment variable points makepkg to the workspace root. Cargo's target directory is set to $srcdir/target to keep build artifacts inside the makepkg sandbox.

The package depends only on sqlite at runtime and cargo at build time.

Updating

After pulling new changes, simply run just arch again and reinstall:

git pull
just arch
sudo pacman -U packaging/archlinux/tesseras-*.pkg.tar.zst