turnstiled(8)

✨ turnstiled(8) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the System Manager's Manual glow-up edition of turnstiled — say hi to the main session management daemon 💅 she's the one running the whole vibe backstage and you literally never see her, which is iconic behaviour honestly 🎀

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🌸 NAME 🌸

turnstiled — the main session management daemon 👑

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

turnstiled [config_path]

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so turnstiled is a daemon, right, and her whole thing is that she tracks user sessions and, if she feels like it, spawns and manages service managers for them. main character energy, honestly 🫶

for the config deets, go read turnstiled.conf(5) — she has a whole personality doc and you're gonna want it 📖✨

the way it works: the second a user logs in, she spawns an instance of the chosen service manager for that user 🌱 and then on the last logout she shuts that instance down again — unless she's been configured to linger, in which case she's like "no babe stay, keep the lights on" 💜

and how does she even know about logins and logouts? through pam_turnstile(8), that's who's passing the notes 📝

ngl the daemon itself takes no options other than possibly a configuration file path, and that's her sole argument. if you don't hand her one, she just uses the default path, which is typically /etc/turnstile/turnstiled.conf 🗂️

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🌈 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR MANAGEMENT 🌈

she can ALSO serve as the manager of the $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable and directory 👑 like, she'll hold down that whole corner of your system too. versatile queen.

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🎀 ENVIRONMENT 🎀

• TURNSTILED_LINGER_ENABLE_FORCE — if this is set during daemon startup (to any value, she's not picky), it enables lingering even if rundir management is disabled 💫 this one's primarily for the people who want the linger functionality and have already worked around the problem in their own rundir management system themselves. lowkey a pro move.

⚠️ but listen. enabling this without having worked around that problem may lead to unfortunate consequences 😭 not a vibe. read it again. we're serious.

and of course, lingering still has to be enabled in the configuration anyway — this flag doesn't do the whole job for you, she's an enabler not a magician 🙈

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that's the whole page bestie, written 2026-02-25, straight out of the System Manager's Manual — go forth and manage those sessions 💖✨🎀🦋🌸