How to Install Jailkit on Ubuntu/Debian

By | May 1, 2023

Jailkit

Jailkit is a set of utilities that can be used to setup a chroot based restricted environment where users have limited access to the file system and the commands they run.

The jailkit utilities make it easy to setup a restricted shell or run services or programs inside such a restricted environment.

Project website
http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/

In this post we shall be installing the jailkit utilities on debian/ubuntu

Install jailkit on Ubuntu/Debian

Jailkit can be installed from the repositories on Ubuntu.

$ sudo apt-get install jailkit

If it is not available in the repositories then you can download the source and compile directly. It will involve only a few steps.

1. Install Build Tools - Since jailkit would be compiled on the system, first of all, its necessary to get the build utilities to compile. So install the following packages

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool flex bison debhelper binutils-gold

2. Download Jailkit - from the following url, or visit the website to get the latest url if it has changed.

http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.16.tar.gz
$ wget http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.16.tar.gz

3. Extract the archive

$ tar -vxzf jailkit-2.16.tar.gz

4. Compile jailkit and create deb file

Jailkit already comes with necessary code and configurations to compile itself into a deb file that can be installed neatly on Debian based systems. Just run the following command and it should be done.

$ cd jailkit-2.16/
$ sudo ./debian/rules binary

5. Install the deb file

The previous command would create a deb file called jailkit_2.16-1_amd64.deb.

$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i jailkit_2.16-1_amd64.deb

Thats it. Now jailkit is installed. Jailkit makes many commands available which can be used to setup chroot based jailed environments. Here are the commands

$ jk_
jk_addjailuser   jk_chrootlaunch  jk_cp            jk_jailuser      jk_lsh           jk_uchroot       
jk_check         jk_chrootsh      jk_init          jk_list          jk_socketd       jk_update

All the above commands have man pages which contain more information about how to use them. Or read more about them at the website

http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit.8.html

Conclusion

The above simple steps showed how to install jailkit utilities. In the next article we shall see how to setup a jailed shell with jailkit. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

About Silver Moon

A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected].

5 Comments

How to Install Jailkit on Ubuntu/Debian
  1. Marius

    sudo ./debian/rules binary
    dh_testdir
    dh_testroot
    dh_clean -k -s
    dh_clean: Compatibility levels before 5 are no longer supported (level 4 requested)
    dh_clean: Compatibility levels before 5 are no longer supported (level 4 requested)
    debian/rules:74: recipe for target ‘install-arch’ failed
    make: *** [install-arch] Error 25

  2. Attila Fulop

    As of today python is also a prerequisite on wheezy

    configure: error: python not found please install python
    make: *** [config.status] Error

    I installed it by apt-get install python

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