Published: 2014-11-19, by Jonathan M. Hethey,reading time: ~2 minutes

Arch Linux Updates and Keyrings (key error)

Package managers are awesome, Windows 10 is finally getting one. I've loved apt, pacman, yum and the like ever since I had a stable internet connection.

Package managers just spare you from grey hair and having to visit a lot of websites to download all kinds of things and then click all of them. It downloads, installs and leaves you the hell alone with things a computer should be able to do on its own.

Recently I tried upgrading my antergos / arch linux notebook and got the following error message, after running pacman -Syu

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n]
(73/73) checking keys in keyring                   [########################] 100%
downloading required keys...
:: Import PGP key 4096R/, "Antergos Build Server (Automated Package Build System) &lt;admin@antergos.org&gt;", created: 2014-08-05? [Y/n]
error: key "Antergos Build Server (Automated Package Build System) &lt;admin@antergos.org&gt;" could not be imported
error: required key missing from keyring
error: failed to commit transaction (unexpected error)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

Now what? Okay, turns out, you have to run the commands like this to be sure that all the packages are signed correctly and some verification stuff that improves your security:

sudo pacman -Syy
sudo pacman -S antergos-keyring
sudo pacman -Suu

Basically this ensures that you have the up to date keys for your derivative. If you run manjaro it would be manjaro-keyring.

Source: I was lucky on one of my google searches and found a thread about the keyrings in the manjaro forum.

The whole reason I needed this was to fix a buggy version of something that had to do with pandoc and creating .pdf from markdown, so I'll probably share a script about that soon.