selinux-please-lie-to-me

SELinux: please lie to me! 😭

This package provides a fake selinux module. This package mocked selinux module and will always pretend SELinux is not enabled on the system.

But why? 😕

If your system runs SELinux and run Ansible in a virtualenv you will probably face this error:

Aborting, target uses selinux but python bindings (libselinux-python) aren't installed!

But what about the regular selinux package from Pypi?

You system comes with a python3-libselinux package that was built using on specific Python version. For instance, on Fedora 34 it's Python 3.9. The same binary package may work fine with another Python version, but it's not always the case.

Example with the selinux shim from pypi

In this example on Fedora 34, we cannot use the selinux shim package because Python 3.6 cannot load the system selinux binary for Python 3.9:

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 ~/tmp/my-venv-py36
(...)
$ ~/tmp/my-venv-py36/bin/pip install selinux
Collecting selinux
  Using cached selinux-0.2.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (4.3 kB)
Requirement already satisfied: setuptools>=39.0 in ./tmp/my-venv-py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages (from selinux) (53.0.0)
Collecting distro>=1.3.0
  Using cached distro-1.5.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (18 kB)
Installing collected packages: distro, selinux
Successfully installed distro-1.5.0 selinux-0.2.1
WARNING: You are using pip version 21.0.1; however, version 21.1.3 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the '/home/goneri/tmp/my-venv-py36/bin/python -m pip install --upgrade pip' command.
$ ~/tmp/my-venv-py36/bin/python -m selinux
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/runpy.py", line 183, in _run_module_as_main
    mod_name, mod_spec, code = _get_module_details(mod_name, _Error)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/runpy.py", line 142, in _get_module_details
    return _get_module_details(pkg_main_name, error)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/runpy.py", line 109, in _get_module_details
    __import__(pkg_name)
  File "/home/goneri/tmp/my-venv-py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selinux/__init__.py", line 104, in <module>
    check_system_sitepackages()
  File "/home/goneri/tmp/my-venv-py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selinux/__init__.py", line 95, in check_system_sitepackages
    success = add_location(candidate)
  File "/home/goneri/tmp/my-venv-py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/selinux/__init__.py", line 65, in add_location
    reload(sys.modules["selinux"])
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.6/importlib/__init__.py", line 166, in reload
    _bootstrap._exec(spec, module)
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/selinux/__init__.py", line 13, in <module>
    from . import _selinux
ImportError: cannot import name '_selinux'

Example with selinux_please_lie_to_me

$ virtualenv -p python3.6 venv
$ source venv/bin/active
$ pip install selinux_please_lie_to_me
$ python3 -c 'import selinux; print(f"SELinux is enabled: {selinux.is_selinux_enabled()}, (which is probably a lie 🤫)")'
SELinux is enabled: False, (which is probably a lie 🤫)

What does this break?

Since, we pretend selinux is disabled, we won't do any SELinux specific operation.