SBUILD-ADDUSER(8)

📦
version 0.89.3 · 10 versions
, in debian trixie

💖 SBUILD-ADDUSER(8) — the sbuild-adduser page, bestie edition 💖

okay so welcome to sbuild-adduser(8) from the Debian sbuild manual — yes that whole (8) thing, it's a sysadmin command, very main character energy. this is the lil tool that hands out sbuild privileges, and i'm gonna walk you through it like we're texting at 2am 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

sbuild-adduser — add an sbuild user 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

sbuild-adduser [-h|--help | -V|--version] USER1 [USER2 [USERn...]]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so first things first, big heads-up: this tool is only useful for the schroot backend. Debian buildds have switched to the unshare backend in 2024, so if that's your situation, this is not the moment, bestie 😭

sbuild-adduser adds the users you name to the sbuild group, which grants them the privilege to build packages with sbuild(1). slay, but it's not fully automatic — the schroot(1) configuration has to permit the user to obtain root permissions in the chroot via the root-users and root-groups options in schroot.conf, because that's literally required to install and remove build-dependencies inside the chroot. no root in the chroot, no build, periodt.

this is normally done using the sbuild group, but additional users or groups may be added in order to grant finer-grained permissions — for example to restrict individual users to particular chroots. so like, you can definitely get more granular if you want. iykyk 👑

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

⭐ Actions

  • -h, --help — Display this manual. the "what does this do again" button, we love her.
  • -V, --version — Print version information. for when you need to know exactly which era of sbuild you're living in.

🍓 User selection

  • USER — The user to be granted sbuild access. yes that's the whole vibe. you give a user, they get access.

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

To allow user rleigh sbuild access:

% sudo sbuild-adduser rleigh

note the sudo — you're changing group membership, so yeah, you need the power. no cap 💀

💜 AUTHORS 💜

Roger Leigh. iconic. we stan.

Copyright © 2006–2008 Roger Leigh <rleigh@debian.org>. keep the copyright, bestie, it's the law (and also just polite ✨).

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

like yes, go read those too, they're the supporting cast and they ate 🫶

and that's the whole page, bestie! it's Version 0.89.3+deb13u4, dated 28 December 2025, and it's the SBUILD-ADDUSER(8) manual — thanks for coming to my ted talk, mwah 💋🌸

📦 where this page comes from