lshell is a shell coded in Python, that lets you restrict a user's environment to limited sets of commands, choose to enable/disable any command over SSH (e.g. SCP, SFTP, rsync, etc.), log user's commands, implement timing restriction, and more.

More information can be found in the manpage: man -l man/lshell.1 or man lshell.

Install from source (tested on Debian/Linux), locally without root privileges:

python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
pip install . --break-system-packages
sudo cp etc/lshell.conf /etc/

Uninstall:

pip uninstall lshell

To launch lshell, just execute lshell specifying the location of your configuration file:

lshell --config /path/to/configuration/file

In order to log a user, you will have to add them to the lshell group:

usermod -aG lshell username

In order to configure a user account to use lshell by default, you must:

chsh -s /usr/bin/lshell user_name

(You might need to ensure that lshell is listed in /etc/shells)

After logging in, users will be restricted to the lshell environment.

lshell.conf presents a template configuration file. See etc/lshell.conf or man file for more information.

A [default] profile is available for all users using lshell. Nevertheless, you can create a [username] section or a [grp:groupname] section to customize users' preferences.

Order of priority when loading preferences is the following:

1. User configuration
2. Group configuration
3. Default configuration

The primary goal of lshell, is to be able to create shell accounts with ssh access and restrict their environment to a couple a needed commands and path.

For example User 'foo' and user 'bar' both belong to the 'users' UNIX group:

• User 'foo': - must be able to access /usr and /var but not /usr/local - use all commands in their PATH except 'su' - has a warning counter set to 5 - has their home path set to '/home/users'

• User 'bar': - must be able to access /etc and /usr but not /usr/local - is allowed default commands plus 'ping' minus 'ls' - strictness is set to 1 (meaning he is not allowed to type an unknown command)

In this case, my configuration file will look something like this:

# CONFIGURATION START
[global]
logpath         : /var/log/lshell/
loglevel        : 2

[default]
allowed         : ['ls','pwd']
forbidden       : [';', '&', '|'] 
warning_counter : 2
timer           : 0
path            : ['/etc', '/usr']
env_path        : ':/sbin:/usr/foo'
scp             : 1 # or 0
sftp            : 1 # or 0
overssh         : ['rsync','ls']
aliases         : {'ls':'ls --color=auto','ll':'ls -l'}

[grp:users]
warning_counter : 5
overssh         : - ['ls']

[foo]
allowed         : 'all' - ['su']
path            : ['/var', '/usr'] - ['/usr/local']
home_path       : '/home/users'

[bar]
allowed         :   ['ping'] - ['ls'] 
path            : - ['/usr/local']
strict          : 1
scpforce        : '/home/bar/uploads/'
# CONFIGURATION END

To contribute, open an issue or send a pull request.

Please use github for all requests: https://github.com/ghantoos/lshell/issues