man(8)

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💖 man(8) — malcontent-webd 💖

okay bestie, pull up a chair, because we're talking about malcontent-webd, the parental-controls web filtering daemon, and yes it lives in section 8 of your man pages (that's the "admin/system stuff" section, iykyk) 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

malcontent-webd — the Parental Controls Web Filtering Daemon 🌸

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

malcontent-webd [-a bus-address]

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so malcontent-webd is literally the coordination process for controlling web filtering blocklists and allowlists. Child accounts that are under parental control on the computer get their blocklists from malcontent-webd, and then they use those lists to figure out which websites to allow or block while they're browsing the internet. no cap, that's the whole vibe 🌈

malcontent-webd is designed to be run by systemd(1) — it's either D-Bus activated (to update the filter list for a specific user) or activated on a systemd timer (to update the filter lists for all users). So there should be no need to run malcontent-webd manually, bestie. if you want to edit web filtering blocklists, use malcontent-client(8) instead. periodt ✨

the actual filtering of web traffic in child sessions? that's done by an NSS module, nss-malcontent(8). not our girl's job 💁‍♀️

now, if an error occurs while updating the filter lists for all users, on a systemd timer, the error info gets written to /var/lib/malcontent-webd/update-error. and on a successful update, that file gets deleted. slay, cleanup queen 🧹

the error file is a key file, for example:

[Web Filter Update Error]
ErrorCode=org.freedesktop.MalcontentWeb1.Filtering.Error.Downloading
# this field is optional
ErrorMessage[en_GB]=There was an error downloading foo from blah.
# this field is mandatory

👑 OPTIONS 👑

  • -a, --bus-address= — the address of a D-Bus message bus to connect to. this one is intended for debugging use only, okay? don't get any ideas. (Default: The system bus.) 🚌
  • -t, --inactivity-timeout= — the inactivity timeout (in milliseconds) to wait before exiting the service if no requests have been made during that period. if you set it to 0, the timeout is disabled and the service will run indefinitely. main character energy, refusing to leave the party 😭 (Default: 30 seconds.)

🌸 ENVIRONMENT 🌸

malcontent-webd supports the standard GLib environment variables for debugging. but hear me when I say: these variables are not intended to be used in production 🙈

  • $G_MESSAGES_DEBUG — this variable can contain one or more debug domain names to display debug output for. the value all will enable all debug output. the default is for no debug output to be enabled.

🔥 EXIT STATUS 🔥

malcontent-webd may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems. let's break it down:

  1. 0 — no problems occurred. the web filtering daemon ran, responded to zero or more requests, and then exited due to being explicitly closed, or timing out due to finishing all requests. ate and left no crumbs ✅
  2. 1 — an invalid option was passed to malcontent-webd on startup. 💀
  3. 2 — the D-Bus name for malcontent-webd was not available. 😭
  4. 3 — malcontent-webd was run in an inappropriate environment, for example as the root user. not her moment 🚫

🎀 FILES 🎀

  • /lib/systemd/system/malcontent-webd.service — the systemd(1) service file which specifies the runtime environment for malcontent-webd. see systemd.service(5). it's giving official paperwork 💜

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

🐛 BUGS 🐛

any bugs which are found should be reported on the project website: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pwithnall/malcontent/-/issues — go snitch, bestie, it's for the greater good 🫶

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

GNOME Foundation, Inc. — Philip Withnall 👑

Copyright © 2025 GNOME Foundation, Inc.

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was version 1.0, dated 9 Jun 2025, and it's literally the man(8) page we just devoured. go forth and filter those websites, you iconic legend 💅✨🦋

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