SELinux Cookbook

May 20, 2026 · View on GitHub

Important

This cookbook is deprecated. Chef Infra Client 18.0 and later include built-in selinux_boolean, selinux_fcontext, selinux_install, selinux_login, selinux_module, selinux_permissive, selinux_port, selinux_state, and selinux_user resources. New work should use those built-in Chef Infra Client resources directly.

Open functional reports against this cookbook, including fcontext built-in override behavior, module reinstall behavior, module compilation behavior, and Amazon Linux 2023 package defaults, affect resource behavior that is now owned by Chef Infra Client. Please file follow-up fixes in chef/chef instead of extending this deprecated compatibility cookbook.

Description

The SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) cookbook provided recipes and custom resources for manipulating SELinux policy enforcement state.

This cookbook is retained only for existing Chef Infra Client 15-17 users that cannot yet move to Chef Infra Client 18 or later. It should not be added to new cookbooks.

SELinux can have one of three settings:

Enforcing

Watches all system access checks, stops all 'Denied access'
Default mode on RHEL systems

Permissive

Allows access but reports violations

Disabled

Disables SELinux from the system but is only read at boot time. If you set this flag, you must reboot.

Disable SELinux only if you plan to not use it. Use Permissive mode if you just need to debug your system.

Requirements

Chef 15.3 or higher

Chef Infra Client 18.0 and later provide the SELinux resources directly. Prefer the built-in resources on those releases.

Platform

RHEL 7+
CentOS 7+
Fedora
Ubuntu
Debian

Resources

The following resources are provided:

Maintainers

This cookbook is maintained by the Sous Chefs. The Sous Chefs are a community of Chef cookbook maintainers working together to maintain important cookbooks. If you’d like to know more please visit sous-chefs.org or come chat with us on the Chef Community Slack in #sous-chefs.

Contributors

This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute.

Backers

Thank you to all our backers!