pacman-mirrors beyond --fasttrack

manjaro 26 / published / guide #48 / ≈ 3 min read

Manjaro's package mirrors are managed by a tool called pacman-mirrors — its own thing, separate from Arch's reflector. The first-hour guide showed you --fasttrack, which is great. This guide is the rest of what pacman-mirrors can do — pick by country, pin a specific mirror, see what it actually chose, and recover when the auto-pick gives you a slow or stale one.

The mirror list, briefly

The file pacman reads is /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist. pacman-mirrors writes it. Its source of truth is a status JSON Manjaro publishes for every mirror, with sync time and a freshness score.

Look at what's currently chosen:

cat /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Which branch is in use:

pacman-mirrors -G

(Outputs stable, testing, or unstable. See the switching branches guide.)

The quick refresh

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5
sudo pacman -Syyu

--fasttrack 5 picks the 5 fastest mirrors world-wide. After it writes the new list, -Syyu with the double-y forces pacman to grab fresh package databases from those new mirrors (without the double-y, pacman would still use the old cache).

Pick by country

If you're in Europe and pacman-mirrors put a Singapore mirror at the top because it tested fast at that exact moment, you'll usually be happier limiting to your continent:

sudo pacman-mirrors --country Norway,Sweden,Denmark
sudo pacman -Syyu

To list every country Manjaro has mirrors in:

pacman-mirrors --geoip --no-update
pacman-mirrors --list                  # also includes "Custom" if you've made one

The interactive picker

sudo pacman-mirrors --interactive

Brings up a menu listing every mirror with its country and last sync time. Use space to mark the ones you want, tab to OK. Useful when you want to manually exclude a known-slow regional mirror without scripting.

Hand-pick a specific mirror

Sometimes you know one mirror is the right one — maybe your university hosts it. Edit by hand:

sudo nano /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

You can comment out lines you don't want with #, or reorder by moving lines. Save, then sudo pacman -Syy.

To stop pacman-mirrors from clobbering your hand-picked file later, switch it to "custom" mode:

sudo pacman-mirrors --method random         # random pick from custom list
sudo pacman-mirrors --method rank           # rank the custom list by speed

Even cleaner: drop a single-mirror file at /etc/pacman.d/mirrors/Custom/<name> and select it as the country.

What does the auto-pick actually do?

Without flags, sudo pacman-mirrors runs a default ranking. There are two modes:

  • method=rank (default) — ping each mirror, sort by response time.
  • method=random — pick at random from currently-up-to-date mirrors.

Set the default behaviour in /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf:

sudo nano /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf

Useful keys:

Branch = stable
OnlyCountry = Norway,Sweden,Denmark
Method = rank

From now on a bare sudo pacman-mirrors picks fastest from Nordic mirrors on the stable branch.

Inspect freshness without changing anything

pacman-mirrors --status

Reports every mirror's sync delay and whether it's currently considered up to date. If your top mirror is 12 hours behind, that's often the explanation for "I see no new packages."

The common pitfalls

Pitfall 1: keyring out of date after a long pause

Symptom: pacman complains about every package signature.

sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring manjaro-keyring
sudo pacman-key --refresh-keys

Pitfall 2: a mirror is "fast" but stale

Re-rank with a freshness floor — only consider mirrors synced in the last 12 hours:

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5 --max-wait-time 5

(--max-wait-time is on the network ping side; the freshness filter is implicit when you re-run after a status update.)

Pitfall 3: an HTTPS mirror is on the list but your network is dropping HTTPS

sudo pacman-mirrors --protocols https            # only https
sudo pacman-mirrors --protocols all              # any

When to re-run pacman-mirrors

  • After install — definitely (the installer's list is alphabetical).
  • After changing branches — yes, mirror sets differ a bit by branch.
  • When you move country — yes.
  • When updates are slow or pacman shows old packages — try it.
  • On a schedule? Optional. Once every couple of months is plenty for most people.

The TL;DR

Three commands cover 90% of life with pacman-mirrors:

sudo pacman-mirrors --country Norway --fasttrack 5   # pick by location, fastest
pacman-mirrors --status                              # how fresh are they
sudo pacman-mirrors --interactive                    # I want to choose manually

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