D-Bus Executor

Launch arbitrary programs via D-Bus.

Background

Sometimes one needs to launch a program over a D-Bus channel (e.g., if the originating context isn't permitted to exec arbitrary software). There is a good utility for this, dbus-app-launcher, but using this in certain Linux distros can be a challenge as the package needs to be manually rebuilt every time there's an update to the Haskell runtime or a dependency.

This is a statically-compilable reimplementation that is intended to be drop-in replacement and should not require rebuilding.

Usage

Put this somewhere on your $PATH and then set up a systemd service that launches it when a D-Bus message comes through. A sample systemd service is provided in ./net.arusahni.dbusexecutor.service, and can be placed in ~/.local/share/dbus-1/services/. Be sure to update it with the absolute path to the dbus-executor binary.

Development

Launch the utility

DBUS_EXEC_LOG=dbus_executor=trace cargo run

Fire a message. gdbus is recommended since it exposes a nicer, JSON-like syntax for complex types such as hashmaps and lists.

gdbus call --session \
    --dest net.arusahni.DbusExecutor \
    --object-path /net/arusahni/DbusExecutor \
    --method net.arusahni.DbusExecutor.Exec.CmdArgsEnv \
    "/bin/ls" '["-la", "/bin/"]' "{\"KEY1\": \"VALUE1\", \"KEY2\": \"VALUE2\"}"