Development/Tutorials/PolicyKit/Introduction

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    Development/Tutorials/PolicyKit/Introduction


    Introduction to PolicyKit
    Tutorial Series   PolicyKit Tutorial
    Previous   DBus activation, Basic DBus knowledge, Basic polkit-qt knowledge
    What's Next   Using the caller-helper model to perform actions as root
    Further Reading   None

    What is PolicyKit

    PolicyKit is an authentication system, that lets developers set a policy on specific actions. It works in strict correlation with DBus and ConsoleKit, and it is really useful in cases where you need to perform privileged actions

    Who is this tutorial for?

    This tutorial is aimed to developers who want their application to perform privileged actions in a secure, consistent and easy way.

    PolicyKit and KDE

    PolicyKit is closely integrated with KDE starting from version 4.3. In kdebase-workspace we have an authorization manager and an authentication agent. What matters the most, though, is polkit-qt library, in kdesupport, that lets us use the PolicyKit library through a nice Qt-styled API. In this tutorial we will be using it as our main development resource.

    Prerequisites

    Your application does not need very special prerequisites to be integrated with PolicyKit. Console applications or libraries can also link to polkit-qt-core, that doesn't add a dependency to QtGui.

    As a developer, you probably need to read the [api documentation], that is a fundamental compound of this tutorial. A fair knowledge of DBus (have a look at the DBus tutorial series for that) can make your workflow better.


    Special files used by PolicyKit

    Before you start diving into PolicyKit integration, you have to know how a .policy file is made. Those files contain a definition of