Installing the unifi controller on Arch

This is more of a note-to-self than a proper blog post. I recently got a new Ubiquiti access point, and needed to reinstall the unifi controller on my Arch machine in order to run it.

There's no formal package for unifi, so you have to install the AUR. I use yaourt for that, and if you do a simple

yaourt -S unifi

...then it will try to install MongoDB from source. According to the Arch Wiki, this requires "180GB+ free disk space, and may take several hours to build (i.e. 6.5 hours on Intel i7, 1 hour on 32 Xeon cores with high-end NVMe.)". So not ideal.

The trick is to install MongoDB from binary first:

yaourt -S mongodb-bin

And only after that:

yaourt -S unifi

Finally, activate the service:

sudo systemctl enable unifi
sudo systemctl start unifi

...and then go to https://localhost:8443/, accept the self-signed cert, and you're all set.