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Reason: Mention disabling of dbus services through use of `systemctl mask` and overrides in `/etc/dbus-1/services` (Discuss in Talk:D-Bus)

D-Bus is a message bus system that provides an easy way for inter-process communication. It consists of a daemon, which can be run both system-wide and for each user session, and a set of libraries to allow applications to use D-Bus.

dbus is pulled and installed as a dependency of systemd and user session bus is started automatically for each user.

## Alternative implementations

### dbus-broker

dbus-broker — A drop-in replacement for the libdbus reference implementation, which aims "to provide high performance and reliability, while keeping compatibility to the D-Bus reference implementation".

  https://github.com/bus1/dbus-broker || dbus-broker

To enable dbus-broker as the system bus, enable `dbus-broker.service`.

To enable as a user bus, a `dbus-broker.service` user unit can be enabled either for a single user, or globally for all users.

Reboot for these settings to take effect.

Note: dbus-broker currently does not have AppArmor support

## Tips and tricks

### Override dbus service

You can override dbus services in `$XDG_DATA_HOME/dbus-1/services`.

If the service is already launched, the override will not work. We must kill the existing service's process, or launch our service earlier.

You can use this to always use a particular service when you have several installed providing the same well-known bus name.

## Debugging

- D-Feet — Easy to use D-Bus debugger GUI tool. D-Feet can be used to inspect D-Bus interfaces of running programs and invoke methods on those interfaces.

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/DFeet || d-feet

- QDbusViewer — GUI D-Bus debugger. Can be used to inspect D-Bus services and invoke methods on them.

  https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qdbusviewer.html || qt5-tools

You can also use busctl(1) from systemd.

## See also

- https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus/
- https://freedesktop.org/wiki/IntroductionToDBus/

Category:

- System administration

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