Disabling Guest Login

By default LightDM allows you to log into a session as a temporary user; disable this with:

[SeatDefaults]
allow-guest=false

Hiding the User List

Greeters my show the list of possible user accounts. If you want to disable this (you have too many users or security concerns) use the following configuration. You may also want to explicitly enable manual login with this feature.

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-hide-users=true

Allow Manual Login

A greeter may not allow you to manually enter the username to log in with. If your greeter supports this it can be enabled with:

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-show-manual-login=true

Setting an Automatic Login

To set the system to automatically start with a logged in user set the autologin-user. If autologin-user-timeout is set the greeter will be shown for this many seconds before the automatic login occurs. User activity will cancel this timeout.

[SeatDefaults]
autologin-user=username
autologin-user-timeout=delay

If you want to set the automatic login to be a guest session then set autologin-guest instead of autologin-user:

autologin-guest=true

Changing the Default Session

Set the default session to be logged into with:

[SeatDefaults]
user-session=name

Where name is the name of the session .desktop file from /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop.

Changing the Greeter

The greeter is set by configuration in /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/ that greeter packages provide. If you need to override this you can set:

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-session=name

Where name is the name of the greeter .desktop file from /usr/share/xgreeters/*.desktop.

Adding System Hooks

If you need some special behaviour when X servers and user sessions start/stop you can set commands to be run with the following configuration:

[SeatDefaults]
display-setup-script=command
display-stopped-script=command
greeter-setup-script=command
session-setup-script=command
session-cleanup-script=command
session-wrapper=command
greeter-wrapper=command

display-setup-script is run after the X server starts but before the user session / greeter is run. Set this if you need to configure anything special in the X server. It is run as root. If this command returns an error code the X server is stopped.

display-stopped-script is run after an X server exits. It is run as root.

greeter-setup-script is run before a greeter starts. It is run as root. If this command returns an error code the greeter fails to start (which will cause LightDM to stop).

session-setup-script is run before a user session starts. If this command returns an error the session will not start (user is returned to a greeter).

session-cleanup-script is run after a greeter or user session stops. It is run as root.

session-wrapper is a the command to run for a session. This command is run as the user and needs to exec the command passed in the arguments to complete running the session. Use this if you need to do special setup for a user session. Note the default is 'lightdm-session' so you should chain to this if you need to override this setting.

session-wrapper is a the command to run a greeter. It is the equivalent of session-wrapper for greeters.

Changing the Wallpaper

LightDM does not configure the look of greeters; to do this configure the appropriate greeter.