Soteria

Soteria is a Polkit authentication agent written in GTK designed to be used with any desktop environment.

Installation • Usage • Why? • Theming

Installation

Soteria requires GTK >= 4.10. For Arch based distros, you will need gtk4, Debian based distros will need libgtk-4-dev, and Fedora based distros will need gtk4-devel.

Additionally, you will need polkit and libpolkit-agent installed. (libpolkit-agent should be shipped with polkit).

Note

If the executable polkit-agent-helper-1 is in a non-standard location (i.e. not /usr/lib/polkit/polkit-agent-helper-1), then you should also set up a configuration file at either /usr/local/etc/soteria/config.toml or /etc/soteria/config.toml with

helper_path = "/path/to/your/helper"

as the contents.

Soteria will also need Rust. It was developed on Rust 1.78.0 however, lower versions of Rust should still work.

Run the following commmand to build and install Soteria:

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/imvaskel/soteria

This should place Soteria into ~/.cargo/bin and you can run it from there.

Or if you use Nix, Soteria is packaged there. There is a NixOS module to enable it under security.soteria.enable.

Usage

Simply have your desktop run the soteria binary to have it register as your authentication agent. Once run, anytime an application requests polkit authentication, it should popup and prompt you to authenticate.

For Hyprland, this would look like:

exec-once = /path/to/soteria

You may also like:

windowrulev2=pin,class:gay.vaskel.Soteria

This makes sure that Soteria stays pinned to your current workspace.

Other desktop environments should be similiar.

Why?

When looking for a polkit authentication agent, I noticed that most were either extremely old, using a framework that I didn't like, or completely unstylable. Additionally, most were hard to edit as they just called out to polkit's libpolkit-agent to do all the work. Because of this, I decieded to put the work in to figure out how authentication agents worked.

Theming

You can theme this application in ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css. The top-level window has the ID soteria-window, so your custom style should go in a block starting #soteria-window {.... From here you can select the separate components using CSS combinators -- run GTK_DEBUG=interactive /path/to/soteria to see the full list.

Debugging

If you would like to debug why something went wrong, just run RUST_LOG=debug soteria and this will start it with debug logging, which should help you identify what's going wrong.