Greetd

greetd is a minimal and flexible login manager daemon that makes no assumptions about what you want to launch.

This article focuses on alpine specific instructions. It is recommended to read the greetd wiki first. This page shows the grpahical greeter gtkgreet which is packaged as greetd-gtkgreet.

Installation

greetd needs to be combined with a greeter. You can find a list of available greeters here: greetd-*. Install the main package and the greeter you selected:

# apk add greetd

Let us use greetd-gtkgreet as an example:

# apk add greetd-gtkgreet

Install a lightweight wayland compositor to be used with greetd login session.(If using Sway, no need for cage)

# apk add cage

Configuration

Graphical greeters like gtkgreet require either seatd or elogind. When you use seatd with a graphical greeter it needs the seatd group:

# adduser greetd seat

Depending on whether seatd or elogind is used, set rc_need=seatdor rc_need=elogind in the following file:

Contents of /etc/conf.d/greetd

rc_need=seatd

If using cage, the config file appears as follows:

Contents of /etc/greetd/config.toml

[default_session] command = "cage -s -- gtkgreet" user = "greetd"

Instead of cage, sway or any wayland compositor can be used:

Contents of /etc/greetd/config.toml

[default_session] command = "sway --config /etc/greetd/sway-config" user = "greetd"

To use sway, create a dedicated sway config that runs the greeter, and terminates when it dies:

Contents of /etc/greetd/sway-config

exec "gtkgreet -l -s /etc/greetd/gtkgreet.css; swaymsg exit"

Edit gtkgreet list of login environments, which is by default read from /etc/greetd/environments. The below example shows Sway wrapper script.

Contents of /etc/greetd/environments

sway-run

Once you have completed the above configuration, Enable and start greetd:

# rc-update add greetd # rc-service greetd start

For text based greeters you want to make sure that vt is set in:

Contents of /etc/greetd/config.toml

[terminal] # The VT to run the greeter on. Can be "next", "current" or a number # designating the VT. vt = 7

See Also

• greetd wiki
• Arch wiki