dh_testroot - Man Page

ensure that a package is built with necessary level of root permissions

Synopsis

dh_testroot [debhelper options]

Description

dh_testroot is used to determine if the target is being run with suffient access to root(-like) features.

The definition of sufficient access depends on whether the builder (the tool invoking the debian/rules target) supports the Rules-Requires-Root (R³) field.  If the builder supports R³, then it will set the environment variable DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT and dh_testroot will validate that the builder followed the minimum requirements for the given value of DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT.

If the builder does not support Rules-Requires-Root, then it will not set the DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT environment variable.  This will in turn make dh_testroot (and the rest of debhelper) fall back to assuming that (fake)root is implied.

The following is a summary of how dh_testroot behaves based on the DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT environment variable (leading and trailing whitespace in the variable is ignored).

Please note that dh_testroot does not read the Rules-Requires-Root field.  Which implies that dh_testroot may produce incorrect result if the builder lies in DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT.  On the flip side, it also enables things like testing for what will happen when DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT is set to a given value.

See Also

debhelper(7)

This program is a part of debhelper.

Author

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

Referenced By

debhelper(7).

2024-07-17 13.11.6 Debhelper