NAME

       dh_testroot - ensure that a package is built with necessary level of root permissions

SYNOPSIS

       dh_testroot [debhelper options]

DESCRIPTION

       dh_testroot is used to determine if the target is being run with suffient access to
       root(-like) features.

       The definition of sufficient access depends on whether the builder (the tool invoking the
       debian/rules target) supports the Rules-Requires-Root (R³) field.  If the builder supports
       R³, then it will set the environment variable DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT and dh_testroot will
       validate that the builder followed the minimum requirements for the given value of
       DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT.

       If the builder does not support Rules-Requires-Root, then it will not set the
       DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT environment variable.  This will in turn make dh_testroot (and the
       rest of debhelper) fall back to assuming that (fake)root is implied.

       The following is a summary of how dh_testroot behaves based on the DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT
       environment variable (leading and trailing whitespace in the variable is ignored).

       -   If unset, or set to "binary-targets", then dh_testroot asserts that it is run as root
           or under fakeroot(1).

       -   If set to "no", then dh_testroot returns successfully (without performing any
           additional checks).

       -   If set to any other value than the above, then dh_testroot asserts that it is either
           run as root (or under fakeroot(1)) or the builder has provided the DEB_GAIN_ROOT_CMD
           environment variable (e.g. via dpkg-buildpackage -r).

       Please note that dh_testroot does not read the Rules-Requires-Root field.  Which implies
       that dh_testroot may produce incorrect result if the builder lies in
       DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT.  On the flip side, it also enables things like testing for what
       will happen when DEB_RULES_REQUIRES_ROOT is set to a given value.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7)

       This program is a part of debhelper.

AUTHOR

       Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>