Where are pacman package databases downloaded from?

Question

When updating your system on archlinux with pacman -Suy, pacman gets package databases from somewhere and then downloads packages from mirrors according to versions specified in these databases.

I know these databases are in /var/lib/pacman/sync/. My question is, where does pacman get them from?

Answer 1

The db files also come from the package mirrors specified in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.

For example in this core repo:

...
core.db             136.6 KiB   2022-Mar-05 12:53
core.db.tar.gz      136.6 KiB   2022-Mar-05 12:53
...

The wiki also mentions what to do if you get an error:

Failed retrieving file 'core.db' from mirror

If you receive this error message with correct mirrors, try setting a different name server.