prometheus-pacman-exporter

A Prometheus metrics exporter for pacman, designed to be run via a systemd timer and consumed by the node exporter textfile collector.

Requirements

Python 3.12+
pacman
checkupdates (optional)
An AUR helper or other update command (optional)

Installation

pip install prometheus-pacman-exporter

Usage

Usage: prometheus-pacman-exporter [OPTIONS]

  Collect pacman package metrics and export them for Prometheus.

  Queries pacman for installed package statistics and available updates, then
  writes them to a .prom file for consumption by the Prometheus node exporter
  textfile collector.

  By default, updateable packages are determined using pacman --query
  --upgrades. Use --use-checkupdates to query updates with checkupdates
  instead. AUR update metrics can optionally be collected by providing --aur
  together with --aur-command.

Options:
  --textfile-collector-dir DIRECTORY
                                  Directory where the Prometheus collector
                                  textfile will be written.
                                  [default: /var/lib/prometheus/node-exporter]
  --use-checkupdates              Use checkupdates instead of pacman to check for
                                  available package updates.
  --aur                           Include AUR updates.
  --aur-command TEXT              Command used to check for AUR updates.
  --color [auto|always|never]     Colorize the output. A bare --color is the
                                  same as --color=always.
                                  [default: auto]
  --no-color                      Disable colorization (alias of
                                  --color=never).
  -q, --quiet                     Suppress all non-error output.
  -v, --verbose                   Enable verbose output.
  --version                       Show version information and exit.
  -h, --help, -?                  Show this message and exit.

Checking for updates

By default, available repository updates are determined using:

pacman --query --upgrades

This only reports updates already known to the local package database.

Use --use-checkupdates to instead use checkupdates, which checks for available updates without modifying the system's package database:

prometheus-pacman-exporter --use-checkupdates

AUR updates

AUR updates can be included with --aur. An update command must also be provided with --aur-command:

prometheus-pacman-exporter \
    --aur \
    --aur-command "paru --query --upgrades --aur"

The AUR command may use any AUR helper or custom program, provided its standard output contains exactly one available package update per line. The exporter counts the number of output lines; it does not interpret the contents of those lines.

For example, output such as:

package-one 1.2.3-1 -> 1.2.4-1
package-two 4.5.6-1 -> 4.6.0-1

is interpreted as two available AUR updates.

Diagnostic or informational messages from the command should therefore be written to standard error rather than standard output.

The value of --aur-command is split into command-line arguments and executed directly. It is not executed through a shell, so shell features such as pipes, redirections, variable expansion, and command substitution are not available.

Metrics

Metric	Description
`pacman_installed_packages`	Total number of installed packages
`pacman_explicit_packages`	Number of explicitly installed packages
`pacman_depends_packages`	Number of packages installed as dependencies
`pacman_unrequired_packages`	Number of packages not required by another package
`pacman_foreign_packages`	Number of packages not present in sync databases
`pacman_native_packages`	Number of packages present in sync databases
`pacman_orphan_packages`	Number of orphaned dependency packages
`pacman_updateable_packages`	Number of available repository package updates
`pacman_aur_updateable_packages`	Number of available AUR package updates

The AUR update metric is only collected when --aur is enabled.

License

BSD-3-Clause. See LICENSE for details.