selinux_config(5) SELinux configuration file selinux_config(5)
NAME
config - The SELinux sub-system configuration file.
DESCRIPTION
The SELinux config file controls the state of SELinux regarding:
1. The policy enforcement status - enforcing, permissive or disabled.
2. The policy name or type that forms a path to the policy to be loaded and its supporting configura‐
tion files.
3. How local users and booleans will be managed when the policy is loaded (note that this function was
used by older releases of SELinux and is now deprecated).
4. How SELinux-aware login applications should behave if no valid SELinux users are configured.
5. Whether the system is to be relabeled or not.
The entries controlling these functions are described in the FILE FORMAT section.
The fully qualified path name of the SELinux configuration file is /etc/selinux/config.
If the config file is missing or corrupt, then no SELinux policy is loaded (i.e. SELinux is disabled).
The sestatus (8) command and the libselinux function selinux_path (3) will return the location of the config
file.
FILE FORMAT
The config file supports the following parameters:
SELINUX = enforcing | permissive | disabled
SELINUXTYPE = policy_name
SETLOCALDEFS = 0 | 1
REQUIREUSERS = 0 | 1
AUTORELABEL = 0 | 1
Where:
SELINUX
This entry can contain one of three values:
enforcing
SELinux security policy is enforced.
permissive
SELinux security policy is not enforced but logs the warnings (i.e. the action is allowed to
proceed).
disabled
SELinux is disabled and no policy is loaded.
The entry can be determined using the sestatus(8) command or selinux_getenforcemode(3).
SELINUXTYPE
The policy_name entry is used to identify the policy type, and becomes the directory name of where the
The actual binary policy is located relative to this directory and also has a policy name pre-allo‐
cated. This information can be retrieved using selinux_binary_policy_path(3). An example entry
retrieved by selinux_binary_policy_path(3) is:
/etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy
The binary policy name has by convention the SELinux policy version that it supports appended to it.
The maximum policy version supported by the kernel can be determined using the sestatus(8) command or
security_policyvers(3). An example binary policy file with the version is:
/etc/selinux/targeted/policy/policy.24
SETLOCALDEFS
This entry is deprecated and should be removed or set to 0.
If set to 1, then selinux_mkload_policy(3) will read the local customization for booleans (see bool‐
eans(5)) and users (see local.users(5)).
REQUIRESEUSERS
This optional entry can be used to fail a login if there is no matching or default entry in the
seusers(5) file or if the seusers file is missing.
It is checked by getseuserbyname(3) that is called by SELinux-aware login applications such as PAM(8).
If set to 0 or the entry missing:
getseuserbyname(3) will return the GNU / Linux user name as the SELinux user.
If set to 1:
getseuserbyname(3) will fail.
The getseuserbyname(3) man page should be consulted for its use. The format of the seusers file is
shown in seusers(5).
AUTORELABEL
This is an optional entry that allows the file system to be relabeled.
If set to 0 and there is a file called .autorelabel in the root directory, then on a reboot, the loader
will drop to a shell where a root login is required. An administrator can then manually relabel the
file system.
If set to 1 or no entry present (the default) and there is a .autorelabel file in the root directory,
then the file system will be automatically relabeled using fixfiles -F restore
In both cases the /.autorelabel file will be removed so that relabeling is not done again.
EXAMPLE
This example config file shows the minimum contents for a system to run SELinux in enforcing mode, with a pol‐
icy_name of 'targeted':
SELINUX = enforcing
SELINUXTYPE = targeted
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