How To Disable or Enable SELinux Temporarily or Permanently?

I have a fedora desktop. I want to run some services but I get an error about SELinux. How can I disable SELinux? Selinux is a security mechanism used generally Linux systems. It has support from Linux kernel. Selinux creates the context for specified services, applications, and users. Prevent these to access an unrelated or unsecured part of the Linux systems. In this tutorial, we will look at how to disable and enable SELinux temporarily or persistently.

Get Status Of SELinux

Before enabling or disabling selinux status listing current status is very useful. We can use sestatus command which will show whether SELinux is enabled or disabled.

$ sestatus

If the sestatus is not installed we can install it in Ubuntu, Debian, Kali, Mint with the following command.

$ sudo apt install policycoreutils

Disable SELinux Temporarily

We can disable SELinux in two-mode. We can disable SELinux temporarily with the setenforce command . This type of command will be effective up to reboot. After reboot configured settings will be effective.

$ setenforce 0

Disable SELinux Persistently

We can disable SELinux persistently by changing /etc/selinux/config . Open the file with nano. We need to be root to edit this file.

$ nano /etc/selinux/config

We will se following lines. To disable SELinux SELINUX=disabled . After this please reboot the system.

# This file controls the state of SELinux on the system. 
# SELINUX= can take one of these three values: 
#     enforcing - SELinux security policy is enforced. 
#     permissive - SELinux prints warnings instead of enforcing. 
#     disabled - No SELinux policy is loaded. 
SELINUX=disabled 
# SELINUXTYPE= can take one of three two values: 
#     targeted - Targeted processes are protected, 
#     minimum - Modification of targeted policy. Only selected processes are protected. 
#     mls - Multi Level Security protection. 
SELINUXTYPE=targeted

Enable SELinux Temporarily

We can enable SELinux temporarily which will affect up to reboot with setenforce 1 command which is the reverse of disabling command.

$ setenforce 1

Enable SELinux Persistently

Similar to the disable we will change above configuration file SELINUX=enforcing .