pam_turnstile(8)

📦
version 0.1.11 · 2 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 pam_turnstile(8) — the turnstile girly pops off 💖

okay bestie, so this is a page from the System Manager's Manual, and it's all about pam_turnstile (yes, section 8, we love a system-management moment) ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

pam_turnstile — no cap, its whole job is registering user sessions in turnstiled(8) 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pam_turnstile.so

that's it. that's the whole synopsis. she's lowkey minimal 💅

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

so pam_turnstile signs your user sessions up with the main daemon, which is how they get tracked. it's giving "someone is watching but in a supportive way" 🫶

it talks to the daemon over its control socket, obviously. when you log in, it opens a connection to the daemon, and that connection stays open for as long as the login lasts. fr fr, the whole time.

and by keeping tabs on all those connections, the daemon gets to know the full lifetime of the session. like, the entire arc. main character energy 👑

bestie, the login is only gonna proceed in one of these cases:

  • the daemon has replied with a success ✅
  • the daemon has replied with a failure 💀
  • the connection was closed 🔌

all three of those get you through. yes, even the failure one. i know. iconic behaviour honestly.

so upon success, the daemon will have already started all user services. and if that's the case, it may also initialize some environment variables for you:

  1. $DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS gets exported — but only assuming RUNDIR/bus exists and is a valid socket, where RUNDIR is the runtime directory the daemon is potentially managing. the value of the environment variable becomes unix:path=/path/to/bus. 💖
  2. $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR gets exported if the daemon's manage_rundir is enabled in the configuration. 🦋

upon success, the module returns PAM_SUCCESS. in any other case, the module returns PAM_SESSION_ERR. no in-between, no chaos, just two moods 😭

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

ngl this section is gonna be short and we're at peace with that:

  • the module takes no options. — that's it. zero flags. she needs nothing from you. minimalist queen 💅

🌟 a lil sign-off 🌟

this lil masterpiece is from the System Manager's Manual, and the page itself is dated 2026-02-25. so yeah — pam_turnstile(8), ate and left no crumbs, periodt 💜💖✨

📦 where this page comes from