Install libselinux with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, Nix, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• avcstat
• compute_av
• compute_create
• compute_member
• compute_relabel
• getconlist
• getdefaultcon
• getenforce
• getfilecon
• getpidcon
• getpidprevcon
• getpolicyload
• getsebool
• getseuser
• matchpathcon
• policyvers
• sefcontext_compile
• selabel_compare
• selabel_digest
• selabel_get_digests_all_partial_matches
• selabel_lookup
• selabel_lookup_best_match
• selabel_partial_match
• selinux_check_access
• selinux_check_securetty_context
• selinuxenabled
• selinuxexeccon
• setenforce
• setfilecon
• togglesebool
• validatetrans

Project history

SELinux began as a National Security Agency research effort around flexible mandatory access control for Linux. NSA documentation from 2001 describes the original SELinux kernel patch for Linux 2.2 and the later Linux Security Module implementation. The modern SELinuxProject userspace repository collects the libraries and tools that complement the kernel feature, including libselinux, libsepol, libsemanage, policycoreutils, and related utilities.

Within that stack, libselinux became the runtime interface for applications that need SELinux context and policy services. The upstream userspace package notes describe libselinux as providing library functions for SELinux kernel APIs such as getcon(), plus support functions such as getseuserbyname(), and note that it may use libsepol when loading policy.

Adoption history

The upstream SELinux README describes SELinux as present in many major Linux distributions and says the userspace libraries and tools are packaged by Alpine, Debian and Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora and RHEL, SLES and openSUSE, Yocto, and others. That made libselinux a quiet but widely depended-on system library rather than an application users install for its own UI.

The userspace packages wiki points to package-manager reverse dependency queries for libselinux as a way to find SELinux-modified programs, and lists init systems, PAM, OpenSSH, cron, sudo, shadow-utils, and other core packages as historical examples of SELinux-aware integration points.

How it is used

Administrators encounter libselinux through utilities such as getenforce, setenforce, getfilecon, setfilecon, matchpathcon, selinuxenabled, and getsebool. Developers encounter it as the C library used by programs that need to read process and file contexts, ask whether SELinux is enabled, or evaluate an SELinux permission decision.

On macOS via Homebrew it is mainly useful for policy analysis and tooling experiments, not for enabling the Linux kernel SELinux enforcement path.

Why package nerds care

libselinux is one of those packages whose importance is mostly visible through dependency graphs: if SELinux support is compiled into system software, this library is often the shared object that appears in the linkage. It is also a good example of how Linux security features split across kernel APIs, policy compilers, runtime libraries, and distro packaging.

For Homebrew users, libselinux is interesting because it brings a Linux security userland component onto macOS mostly as a build dependency and analysis library, exposing the portability boundary between SELinux policy tooling and actual SELinux enforcement.

Timeline

• 2001: NSA published SELinux technical reports covering the Linux 2.2 kernel patch and the Linux Security Module based implementation.
• 2008-09-09: The SELinux userspace release archive lists source tarball releases for libselinux, libsepol, policycoreutils, and related packages.
• 2015-02-02: The userspace release notes moved the default SELinux module store to /var/lib/selinux/.
• 2026-02-02: The SELinuxProject repository release list records SELinux userspace release 3.10.

Related projects

• libsepol manipulates SELinux binary policy, libsemanage manages installed policy modules, policycoreutils provides administrative commands, checkpolicy and secilc compile policy, and the Linux kernel enforces the loaded policy.

Sources

• https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux
• https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki
• https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Releases
• https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/wiki/Userspace-Packages
• https://www.nsa.gov/Research/Technical-Papers-Brochures/smdpage14229/2/smdsort14229/description/