greetd(1) General Commands Manual greetd(1)

greetd - A login manager daemon

greetd [options]

-h, --help

Show help message and quit.

-c, --config <config>

Specifies the configuration file to use.

--vt <vt>

The VT to use, overwriting the value from the configuration file. This can be useful when starting an instance per VT if greetd cannot deduce the intended VT from an associated controlling terminal.

greetd was created to fill the need for a simple login manager that makes no assumptions about the applications it starts, thus being equally suitable for starting console sessions, Wayland sessions, or something else entirely.

greetd does not itself interact with the user, but relies on an external greeter process like agreety(1) to handle that aspect.

greetd operates on sessions. A greeter creates a session, attempts to authenticate a user in it, and finally, uses it start an arbitrary application.

There are two types of preconfigured sessions: The default session, also known as the greeter, and the optional initial session, serving the purpose of "auto-login". The initial session, if configured, is started once when greetd launches. The default session is started on launch if an initial session is not configured, and started again whenever no session is running, such as when the user logs out.

An IPC socket is exposed to this greeter, as reported by GREETD_SOCK. The greeter can use this to create, authenticate and finally start a session. For more information about the IPC layer, see greetd-ipc(7).

Once the greeter has requested the start of a session and terminated itself, greetd will start the new session. Once this session terminates, the process starts over.

greetd makes no assumptions about any sessions, including the greeter. They can be text-based, running in the active console, or full-on graphical environments.

greetd looks for a configuration file in /etc/greetd/config.toml by default. This can be overriden with a command-line argument.

For information on the config file format, see greetd(5).

Maintained by Kenny Levinsen <contact@kl.wtf>. For more information about greetd development, see https://git.sr.ht/~kennylevinsen/greetd.

greetd(5) greetd-ipc(7)

2024-04-22